Brazil's Political System Broken, Says Former President Cardoso

05/19/2015 - 10h47

Brazil's political system is broken and reforms are needed to restore its credibility in the eyes of voters, according to Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a former president of Latin America's largest country.

A vast corruption scandal at Petrobras, the state-owned oil company, coupled with a slowing economy and bickering between President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers' party (PT) and congress are crippling the system, said Mr Cardoso, who served two terms between 1995 and 2002.

"We have a crisis of legitimacy," Mr Cardoso told the Financial Times in an interview. "The point is that today the population just doesn't care about political life, they consider it altogether bad, so there is a lack of legitimacy and this is because of so many mistakes that have been occurring in the last years."

Mr Cardoso is credited by many with implementing reforms in the 1990s that stabilised runaway inflation in Brazil and laid the groundwork for the country's economic success during the first decade of this century.

A sociologist and professor by training, the 83-year-old is considered an elder statesman but remains the key figure in Brazil's centrist opposition party, the Brazilian Social Democracy party (PSDB) which he helped to found.

The scholarly son of a former general, he was not as popular with voters as his successor, the PT's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a metal worker and unionist who hailed from the working classes. But he remains highly respected by business leaders.

Mr Cardoso said the problem with Brazil's political system was that it had become an awkward blend of parliamentary democracy and a presidential system.

Although officially a presidential system, with no formal links between the executive and legislative branches, in practice presidents are forced to award ministries to their allies in congress or face policy paralysis.

In the case of weaker presidents, the situation becomes increasingly difficult. Ms Rousseff, who won re-election in October 2014 by one of the narrowest margins in recent history, has an unwieldy cabinet of 39 ministers.

"We are living now as if we were a mix of parliamentarianism and presidentialism - it cannot go on for a long time, forever," said Mr Cardoso.

He said the most outward sign of the crisis was Ms Rousseff's sinking popularity - between December and March the number of people who regarded her government as bad or terrible rose to 64 per cent from 27 per cent. This has led to demonstrations in major cities demanding her impeachment.

"Some people are speaking about impeachment," he said. "The fact that they are speaking about it six months after the election is a signal that something is wrong."

Ms Rousseff's main coalition partner, the Brazilian Democratic Movement party (PMDB), a collection of regionalist politicians, has used her political weakness to seize control of both speaker positions in the upper and lower houses of congress.

Meanwhile, the vice-president, Michel Temer, also of the PMDB, has taken control of political co-ordination between the presidential palace and congress, in effect taking charge of the third leg of the triumvirate.

In practice, this has made it more difficult for Ms Rousseff to push through an urgent fiscal adjustment programme to restore Brazil's sinking public finances, analysts say.

Mr Cardoso backed a proposal by José Serra, a senator from the PSDB and a former presidential candidate, to introduce direct elections in Brazil's municipal polls next year, as a first step to national reform.

Brazil elects its federal and state lawmakers and city councillors through an open-list proportional system. Each party or coalition registers a list of candidates. Voters can choose individuals or a party but in practice the system allows many virtually anonymous candidates to win seats.

For instance, when a clown, Tiririca stood for election in 2010, a record number of people voted for him, many of them as a protest vote. But under the proportional system, Tiririca's high percentage of the overall vote gave his party the right to place a large number of other, virtually unknown people in congress.

Mr Cardoso said experimenting with direct elections, in which each candidate for the city council would be elected by people living in his or her district, could be a first step to national reforms to make politicians more individually accountable.

"Let's try to see at least at local level if it is possible to try another electoral system. If it is OK, let's extend it to other levels," he said.

Mr Cardoso said in spite of the PT's problems, he expected it to try to persuade Mr Lula da Silva to run again in 2018.

"The PT has no alternative other than Lula," Mr Cardoso said.

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