A speech by candidate Pablo Marçal this week drew attention not only because of its bluntness, prejudiced and discriminatory tone, but also because it confirms a reality when observing the black and female presence in the legislative chambers or in the Brazilian Executive Branch.
The candidate said: “Women don’t vote for women because they are intelligent. If that were the case, poor people would vote for poor people and black people would vote for black people.”
The presence of black people, women or people from the simplest strata of our society is almost zero in decision-making positions in spaces of political power in Brazil.
What the candidate, in addition to the sexist offense towards women, forgot to say is that elections in our country have a history of exclusion, discrimination, whether due to male action present in the leadership of a large part of the party leaders, or by the power financial that is still male and white, which leads to processes of exclusion right from the start, where women, blacks and the poor are rarely allowed to compete with chances of victory, feeding back into a system of exclusion where, in a simplistic way, politicians in general right wing people spread this type of highly prejudiced and hostile phrase.
This exclusionary process has already been analyzed, studied and even highlighted as one of the deficiencies of our democracy. Studies carried out based on the lack of representation in spaces of political power even point out one of the vulnerabilities and discredit in our democracy.
This absence of significant portions of our society resulted a few decades ago in quotas for women in electoral disputes, forcing parties to launch at least 30% of female candidates in all elections, which also generated the Brazilian way of solving the problem, placing women in disputes without any financial or political conditions to win an election, where they often appear as extras to fulfill quotas without any conditions for victory, a fact ignored by candidate Marçal in his speech.
Aware of these problems and once again in an attempt to solve the central problem, which is economic, a law was created that forced political parties to increase and prioritize campaign financing for women and black people in campaigns, which was ignored and Recently, the parties that circumvented this law were amnestied and only one party voted against the amnesty.
For these and other reasons, the candidate’s speech becomes shallow, inappropriate, prejudiced and above all undemocratic, providing more prejudice and machismo in the already highly exclusionary world of Brazilian politics.
