Re-election scapegoated for Brazil’s political woes

Changing electoral rules is one of the most common measures adopted by Brazil’s Congress in response to crises of representation. 

Political parties and Congress were the least-trusted institutions among those presented to respondents in a July 2023 survey.

But changing the rules of the game (which has happened, on average, every six months over the past decade) is also a response to lawmakers’ own interests.

Currently, the Senate is discussing the publication of a new electoral code to consolidate and update rules that are currently scattered across at least six different laws. New rules are also being debated, such as an obligation for military officers to retire before running for public office — a way to reduce the politicization of the barracks.

In the wake of these discussions, some proposals seek to prohibit the re-election of presidents, governors, and mayors — while changing the length of their terms — and unify the country’s electoral cycles, which have general (federal and state) and municipal disputes taking place two years apart.

The possibility of re-election was enshrined in Brazil’s Constitution in 1997, about a decade after the return to democracy. Now, the president of the Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco, has made the end of this provision a priority of his 2024 agenda.

Re-election has been made the scapegoat for Brazil’s political woes, with those against it saying that quests for a new term mean incumbents have little incentive to push for unpopular but necessary reforms. 

But analysts see ulterior motives behind the push to scrap re-election. First, were the current proposal to go through, members of Congress would see their own terms of office extended — from four to five years for members of the House, and from eight to ten for Senators — before the same...