Congress wants a new pardon for non-compliance with quotas for women and blacks. Without the measure, acronyms would have to return to the public coffers at least R$ 487 million that they failed to pass on to these candidates in 2022. their rendering of accounts, including disrespect for the minimum transfer of public campaign funds to women and blacks, 21 parties failed to allocate at least R$487 million to these candidates in the 2022 elections.
The amount, which could reach BRL 693 million in the worst case scenario, was calculated by DW based on partial data from the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) and considers only resources from the Special Campaign Financing Fund (FEFC) declared as received by the applications. The destination of most of this amount (95%) is in the TSE system.
According to electoral law specialists consulted by DW, without the planned amnesty, non-compliance with race and gender quotas would imply the return of these resources to public coffers by parties and candidates.
These are expressive values considering that campaigns, today, are funded almost entirely with public money: of every R$ 100 that dripped into the accounts of candidates and parties in 2022, R$ 81 were paid by the taxpayer – and most of that money came from the FEFC: BRL 4.89 billion of the BRL 5.28 billion.
The report’s calculation disregards the Party Fund, which has a more modest weight in campaign financing (R$396 million) and whose distribution, which is more complex, is subject to regional criteria of proportionality. If the rules for minimum transfers have also been infringed in the allocation of the Party Fund to campaigns, this liability may be greater.
Threatened whole plates
For the president of the Electoral Law Commission of the São Paulo Bar Association, Ricardo Vita Porto, disrespect for quotas for women and blacks could even, at the limit, lead to the loss of mandate of an entire slate elected by a party.
“There have already been cassations for orange candidacies, with a declaration of nullity of the votes of the entire slate for non-compliance with the minimum number of candidacies [de mulheres]”, says Porto.
For him, this understanding could be extended to the underfunding of women and blacks, although this has not yet happened.
“If the impeachment is a consequence of the fraud with the minimum vacancy limit, it must also be a consequence of the fraud with the funding limit”, he argues.
More serious situation from a racial perspective
President of the Electoral Law Commission of the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB) of Minas Gerais, Isabela Damasceno agrees.
“Without resources, there is no campaign. When you make the campaign of a woman, a black person, financially unfeasible, in a way it is as if you had a fictitious candidacy”, she says.
In 2022, while the partial data of the TSE most parties kept women’s campaigns in a situation of underfunding, a detailed look reveals that the situation is much more serious from a racial perspective.
While women who did not declare themselves black or brown account for a deficit of BRL 24 million compared to other groups, this number reaches BRL 238 million among black women and exceeds BRL 430 million among black men.
Parties have been moving for decades against electoral quotas
The attempt to guarantee space for women in institutional politics has been going on since 1997, when a law instituted a minimum reserve of 30% of vacancies for candidates by gender, which only became mandatory in 2009. This reserve also came into effect for public campaign resources in 2018, by decision of the Federal Supreme Court (STF).
In practice, the minimum reserve of 30% is only applied to women, but until the last decade it was systematically disregarded by the parties – and each new election is accompanied by reports of quota fraud through orange candidates, those who do not receive a penny. to campaign.
In 2020, the Electoral Court also instituted funding quotas for black people, who are now entitled to a slice of public campaign resources proportional to the number of black and brown candidates.
However, in 2022, six months before the election and anticipating any problems with the Electoral Justice, Congress approved an amendment to the Constitution in which it granted amnesty to parties for non-compliance with funding quotas for women and blacks.
At the same time, the amendment included in the Constitution the proportional financing of candidacies – but only for women, and with a text that mentions a minimum floor of 30%.
In practice, according to Damasceno, this confusing wording leaves room for dubious interpretations of the legislation, to the extent that parties are limited to sharing 30% of resources with women even in cases where they account for a proportionately larger share of candidacies.
“Democracy is under attack”
After the 2022 elections, the parties want to change the Constitution once again to, in similar terms, self-amnesty for not meeting quotas, avoiding having to return millions of reais spent irregularly.
One of the arguments in favor of the proposal is that the parties did not have time to adapt to the norms – which the lawyer and member of the Brazilian Academy of Electoral and Political Law Hanna Gonçalves contests, noting that the funding quotas had been in force since 2018.
“The amendment consolidated an understanding that had been in force since 2018. Since then, we have had three elections”, criticizes Gonçalves. “Democracy is being attacked when political parties fail to use public resources earmarked for minority group candidacies.”
New amnesty on the way?
Dubbed the Amnesty PEC, the Proposed Amendment to the Constitution 9/2023, which is being discussed in the Chamber, goes beyond quotas by exempting parties from punishment for any irregularities in their accountability.
Signed by 184 deputies, the text that united oppositionists and government supporters would render innocuous Electoral Justice sanctions against parties and candidates in cases of proven misuse of public money – only in relation to the rendering of accounts for 2017, a non-election year, the TSE charges the return, with interest, of R$ 40 million. According to a report by Folha, the money covered, among other things, expenses with a swimming pool, a plane and four tons of meat.
The proposal also provides for the return of corporate donations, vetoed since 2015 by decision of the STF, to settle debts contracted before the ban.
Approved by the Chamber’s Constitution and Justice Commission (CCJ) in May, the text must still be discussed in a special commission before going on to a plenary vote, where it would need to be endorsed by at least 308 of the 513 deputies – the last amnesty, in 2022, passed in the same House with 400 votes.
According to Folha, deputies are committed to speeding up the proposal for fear of wear and tear in front of public opinion. One of the considered maneuvers is to take the text directly to the plenary, skipping the debate stage in a special committee.
understand the calculus
To calculate the underfunding of women and black candidacies, the report was based on TSE rules that determine that FEFC transfers must follow the proportionality criterion, considering first the gender, and then the number of black candidacies within each gender.
In a practical example of a party that receives R$ 1 million from the FEFC, it would work like this: if the party launches 100 candidates throughout Brazil, 36 of which are women, it must allocate at least R$ 360 thousand (36%) to the candidates. The minimum reserve of resources for black candidates will depend on the proportion of these groups between women and men separately.
In the same example, if the party has 36 female candidates, and 18 of them (50%) are black, half of the resources reserved for women (R$ 180 thousand, in this case) must be transferred to black candidates. The same goes for men: if, of the 64 candidates, 32 are black, they are entitled to at least half of the budget allocated to men.
Considering the data available in the TSE system up to the beginning of June 2023, the differences between the values actually declared by candidates by gender and race and the ideal values were analyzed, if the quotas had been observed.
In the best scenario, the balance of amounts not yet declared would have been applied entirely to applications from women and black people, mitigating underfunding, hence the value of BRL 489 million. In the worst case scenario, underfunding would not have changed, and the still undeclared balance would have been applied to candidacies from groups with no underfunding problems – the majority of men who declared themselves neither black nor brown.
#Amnesty #rid #parties #billion #trouble