Electoral courts sets campaign spending caps for 2022

The Brazilian Superior Electoral Court unanimously ruled on maintaining spending caps for electoral campaigns this year. As Congress failed to pass legislation on how much parties will be entitled to spend, justices decided that the same amount should be allocated as in 2018, adjusted for inflation.

According to Supreme Court Justice Alexandre Moraes, who presides over the Electoral Justice system, said the readjustment from 2018 would be to the tune of 26 percent. 

This means the funding limit for 2022 should be set at BRL 88.3 million (USD 16.8 million) for the first round of the presidential race and half of that for a possible runoff campaign.

The Supreme Court in September 2015 banned corporate donations. Since then, parties have (at least officially) relied exclusively on individual donations and on a publicly financed electoral fund.

This fund is split into groups according to congressional representation. Therefore, electing a large bench has become a matter of survival for parties. The rules as they stand incentivize parties to bet on “vote magnets” even more than they did in the past. 

Vote magnets are what Brazilians call congressional candidates with massive popular appeal and name recognition, whose sole purpose is to draw votes (rather than, say, communicate a party’s program) which then help their party elect lesser-known candidates down the party list – which is how Brazil’s proportional representation system works. 

To draw attention, some politicians turn to the outrageous – or the flat-out bizarre. In 2010, a clown made a pun of his name to create a catchy slogan that translates as something like: “Tiririca, because things can’t get any worse.”

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