POLITICAL REFORM
The Big Center's plan to tame the Liberal Party could instead make it bigger
House Speaker Hugo Motta wants to curb social media influencers’ sway over elections. Photo: Marina Ramos/CD
Leaders of Brazil's Big Center agreed on Oct. 28 to rewrite the rules for electing the lower house of Congress, less than a month after an election in which the Liberal Party (PL) won 121 of 513 seats, the largest caucus to emerge on Election Day since 1990.
Under the plan, which we reported last week, the 2030 election would use distritão (literally "big district"), in which each state's most-voted candidates win regardless of party, before a mixed system takes over in 2034. The bloc wants a constitutional amendment approved before the new Congress takes office in February 2027.
The target is the so-called "vote magnet." Brazil elects congressmen by open-list proportional representation, so a party's seats depend on the combined votes of all its candidates, and a single star can drag a dozen colleagues into office.
Nikolas Ferreira in Minas Gerais and Lucas Pavanato in São Paulo, both PL social media stars, drew more votes than every presidential candidate except President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro. Ferreira alone collected the equivalent of 14.5 electoral quotients, the vote total needed for one seat, according to an analysis by political scientist Vinícius Justo of the Brazilian Institute of Economics at the Getulio Vargas Foundation.
Justo found that the surplus votes of such candidates more than doubled from 2022 to 2026, and that 77% of them went to the PL and the federation led by President Lula's Workers' Party (PT). In districts, the reasoning goes, a well-funded local leader could beat a celebrity whose fans are spread across a whole state.
The Brazilian Report reran last month's House race under five new sets of rules, using official Superior Electoral Court data. Every vote and each state's seat count stayed fixed. Only the formula turning votes into seats changed. Under current rules, our model reproduces the actual result in all 26 states and the Federal District…
🔒 This was a free preview; the rest is behind our paywall
Interested in advertising with us? Get in touch.
Need a special report? We can do it.
Have an idea for an article or column? Pitch us
Your inbox, your choice. We publish several newsletters so you can follow the parts of Brazil that matter most to you. If Brazil Daily isn’t one of them, you can unsubscribe from it at any time and keep receiving the rest. Update your preferences here.
