Sarney Party Dominates Brazil Vote

On the eve of a historic transfer of government in Brazil to civilians last year after two decades of military rule, Jose Sarney’s wife found the veteran politician flat on his back in bed at 8 p.m.

“Are you sick, today of all days?” she asked.

“No,” Sarney replied, “I’m just practicing to be vice president.”

A few hours later, President-elect Tancredo Neves was in intensive care, fatally ill after emergency surgery. At 3:12 a.m., Sarney was told he would take the presidential oath five hours and 48 minutes later.

“I felt as if I had been struck by lightning,” Sarney recalled in the current issue of the quarterly Foreign Affairs.

Commanding Role

Lightning struck anew Monday. Sarney’s centrist government scored an overwhelming victory in state and congressional elections that will give his party, the Brazilian Democratic Movement, a commanding role in charting Brazil’s course into the 21st Century.

The 56-year-old president, whose mandate began in national mourning and uncertainty 19 months ago, exultantly called it “the most expressive victory in the history of our country.”

Backed by an economic boom, Sarney’s party, which calls for developmental economics laced with greater social justice, turned back challenges from left and right. Some of its vanquished opponents bitterly wondered aloud Monday if the party was on its way to becoming a monolith, along the lines of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party.

Leisurely counted returns from Saturday’s election gave Sarney’s party and its coalition partner, the Liberal Front, control of about two-thirds of the new Congress. The Brazilian Democratic Movement also won 20 governorships, with three still too close to call.

Wellington Moreira Franco, the party’s candidate for governor in Rio de Janeiro state, easily outdistanced a leftist opponent supported by outgoing Gov. Leonel Brizola, a perennial presidential contender and Brazil’s most charismatic man of the left.

In Sao Paulo, veteran Orestes Quercia, effectively manipulating the ruling party’s machine, was a runaway victor over a liberal industrialist and a conservative former presidential candidate.

Will Write Constitution

The new Congress has both legislative and constitution-writing powers and will begin drafting a new charter next Feb. 1 to replace one inherited from the military. Among the provisions will be one fixing the length of the presidential term, beginning with Sarney’s. A term of five or six years without possibility of immediate reelection is most likely.

No single vision rules the diffuse Brazilian Democratic Movement, whose members are separated both philosophically between the center-left and the center-right, and geographically, between the nation’s rich south and its poor northern and western sectors. Sarney, a self-described liberal, bridges the party center.

Some party leaders share Sarney’s vision of a leaner Brazilian state and reliance on the private sector as the principal engine of growth, while others favor big government with strong economic intervention. There is less internal debate over Sarney’s strong commitment to a more equitable society, but many party members are wed mostly to local and regional concerns.

Despite the impressive election victory, political observers here doubted Monday that it would either give Sarney unrivaled control of the party or enable his views to dominate the constituent assembly.

Just as the election was won on economics, so, the observers say, will the shape of Brazil’s new constitution be colored at least in part by the economic results between now and when the Congress convenes.

Purchasing Power Up

Strong growth under a stabilization program called the Cruzado Plan--which froze wages and prices--has been accompanied by sharp increases in purchasing power among workers at the lower end of the economic spectrum as well as a sharp reduction in the inflation rate, from 400% annually to 30%.

“The election outcome showed the great support of the people for the Cruzado Plan,” Sarney said Monday.

With victory in his pocket, it is now up to Sarney to make some hard economic choices.

A consumer boom has overheated the economy, and the government is preparing measures to cool it off. Some of them, in the form of possible higher gasoline prices and increased tariffs for government services, are bound to be unpopular, hitting pocketbooks that Sarney would rather not touch.