Free Ballots and Big Headaches

By George Russell

The military moves toward democracy, but suffers election losses

Even though the occasion was deadly serious, something of a carnival atmosphere descended on Brazil last week, months ahead of its early-spring schedule. About 50 million voters joked and gossiped as they waited at polling stations throughout the vast, rapidly developing Latin American country. The reason for Brazil's mildly intoxicated mood: for the first time since the military forces took power in 1964, citizens were freely exercising the right to choose well over 40,000 political officeholders at almost every level of government.

Only one vitally important officeholder remained exempt from the democratic process: Brazil's fifth consecutive military-appointed President, Joao Baptista Figueiredo, 64, who will not step down until 1985. Before the voting, Figueiredo, a folksy, blunt-spoken former cavalry general, hailed the elections as a vindication of his three-year policy of abertura (opening), the promise of a slow and gradual return of democratic freedom to Brazil. Said he: "We're going to stuff the opposition with democracy until they get indigestion."

The results of the balloting, however, promise to give recurring headaches to Figueiredo and his conservative Social Democratic Party (P.D.S.). In the process of choosing thousands of city councilors, mayors, state assemblymen, federal congressmen, senators and state governors, the voters delivered an unmistakable rebuff to the military-sponsored authoritarian regime. At week's end, results were still trickling in from the balloting exercise, in which voters in Brazil's remote Amazonian hinterlands were forced to travel by truck, airplane or even dugout canoe in order to register their electoral preference.

Nonetheless, it appeared that opposition candidates were poised to win governorships in at least eight states, containing 56% of Brazil's estimated 121.5 million people. Already given up for lost by the P.D.S. was the governor's race in the wealthy state of Sao Paulo (pop. 25 million), the teeming industrial hub that produces about 40% of Brazil's $283 billion gross domestic product. The likely winner in Sao Paulo was Andre Franco Montoro, 66, candidate of the center-left Brazilian Democratic Movement (P.M.D.B.). Said Montoro of his assumed victory: "Our only commitment is to substitute democratic practice for the abuse of power."

For Figueiredo's military backers, an even more alarming outcome loomed in the major southeastern state of Rio de Janeiro. There, a front runner in the gubernatorial race was Leonel Brizola, 62, a charismatic populist and onetime left-wing orator who was governor of Brazil's southern state of Rio Grande do Sul at the time of the 1964 military coup. Brizola, who used to extol the virtues of Fidel Castro, has been cited by military men as one of the reasons that they seized power in the first place. At week's end Brizola was leading his P.D.S. opponent, 694,000 votes to 653,000.

Brizola's success at the polls, and his very presence in Brazil, is a tribute to Figueiredo's abertura. After 15 years of exile in neighboring Uruguay and in the U.S., Brizola was granted amnesty in 1979, along with hundreds of other opponents of the military regime.* According to the U.S. State Department, there are no longer any political prisoners in Brazilian jails.

Figueiredo has also virtually abolished press and cultural censorship. The startling result is that Brazil, a country that is technically under conservative military rule, was briefly flooded with pent-up leftist and Marxist writings decrying the country's political and economic organization. Indeed, one of Brazil's best-known writers is Fernando Gabeira, who in 1969 helped to plan the kidnaping of U.S. Ambassador to Brazil Charles Elbrick.

Though Figueiredo's decision to hold elections was welcome, his party's tactics during the four-month election campaign were not. In November 1981, the government rewrote election rules to divide its previously unified civilian opposition into five competing parties. The regime also ordered that balloting for all offices follow a straight party ticket. That maneuver gave an enormous advantage to the P.D.S., particularly in Brazil's expansive and underdeveloped rural areas, where government-sponsored officeholders control crucial pork-barrel funds. Finally, the government banned all but the most innocuous political advertising from radio and television during the last month of the campaign. The exception was a skillfully made film of Figueiredo himself, Joao a Brazilian.

Figueiredo, who enjoys enormous personal popularity among ordinary Brazilians, also campaigned tirelessly. At one point he even allowed himself to be dumped in a mud puddle by friendly prospectors at an Amazon gold-rush site.

The Brazilian government can live, however uncomfortably, with its anticipated election losses. Over the years, the military has remodeled the Brazilian federal constitution (originally inspired by that of the U.S.) to give enormous powers to the central government. Even though opposition figures control key state governorships, their budgets will be set by the regime in Brasilia.

In a striking reversal of the U.S. principle of legislative supremacy, laws proposed by the Brazilian President automatically become law unless the congress votes them down within 45 days. Also, the military can still make use of the country's sweeping National Security Law, a vaguely worded statute that allows arbitrary police or military action virtually whenever the inner military circle of the federal government desires.

Despite those powers, even the most vociferous opponents of the Figueiredo government admit that the elections were a significant step toward full democracy. The exercise is also an achievement that Ronald Reagan can praise when he begins his four-day visit to Brazil on Nov. 30. As for Figueiredo, he is on the record as saying that "democracy, even one in trouble, is worth far more than any progressive dictatorship." The big question is whether he and his fellow generals will feel the same way in 1985. --By George Russell. Reported by Gavin Scott/Rio de Janeiro

* Figueiredo has reason to feel sympathy for political exiles. As a boy, he spent years in Argentina because his father, also a general, had fled Brazil in 1938 after failing in an attempt to overthrow Brazilian Populist Dictator Getulio Vargas.

With reporting by Gavin Scott/Rio de Janeiro

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