Part 8: Fighting on Two Fronts: The 1982 Elections
Special thanks to @Dan1988 for discussing and helping me about Brazilian media, and especially the formation of TTL's TV Brasil, in this chapter.
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Part 8: Fighting on Two Fronts: The 1982 Elections
"Only fraud can defeat us." --Pedro Simon, PMDB candidate for the governorship of Rio Grande do Sul (1).
Everyone knew, long before election season began, that the opposition would gain several million more votes than PDS. Not even the most ardent government supporters doubted that. However, that wasn't the whole story, for the opposition had several hurdles to overcome. First was the fact that electoral coalitions were forbidden, ensuring that their vote would be split among several candidates. This was especially apparent in Rio Grande do Sul, where gubernatorial candidates Pedro Simon (PMDB) and Alceu Collares (PTB), split the votes among themselves, giving PDS candidate Jair Soares a chance to win: All he needed was to do was gain a little more than 35% of the vote, with the other two candidates coming short thanks to their division.
There was also the "bound vote" (explained in the chapter before this one) that ensured that hundreds of thousands of votes were nullified either because they didn't vote for the entire party of their choice or forgot to fill in one of the blanks. This meant that several potential opposition votes ere almost literally thrown into a trash bin. The PDS candidates were also favored by the fact that nearly all the incumbent governors were fellow party members, giving them a chance to use the state public machines to turbine their campaigns (this was technically illegal, but nobody who really mattered cared). As such, even if they got fewer votes than PMDB, PTB and PT, PDS could still gain more governorships (2).
The cartoon speaks for itself.
That wasn't the end of it. They also had to fight on the media front, and most of the TV networks and stations were in pro-government hands. The most powerful of all was the mighty TV Globo, controlled by Roberto Marinho, who also owned a newspaper and a radio station with the same name. A man who supported the dictatorship since before it began, actively endorsing the 1964 coup against president João Goulart. Rede Globo and its other media counterparts could be trusted not to be critical of the government. There was also SBT, one of two TV networks created after the end of TV Tupi, Brazil's first television station, which was caused by several crises after the death of its founder, fromer Paraíba senator Assis Chateaubriand. This part of Tupi was owned by Silvio Santos, another pro-government media baron, who also had political ambitions of his own.
Roberto Marinho having a polite but tense conversation with his soon to become archenemy, governor Leonel Brizola.
Santos had control over only one half of Tupi's corpse. The other half was, surprisingly, given not to the equally pro-government Grupo Bloch, but to Jornal do Brasil, a newspaper that was very critical of the regime. In hindsight, one can see that this "bipartisan" division (one pro-government half, one opposition half) was not so surprising, given the trend towards liberalization controlled by president Figueiredo. Roberto Marinho was very alarmed by this development, since Jornal do Brasil already owned a newspaper (of course) and a radio station (Rádio JB). A TV channel under its control, even a token one, would turn JB into a serious threat to his Globo empire. He repeatedly asked the president to rethink this decision, and hand the concession to Bloch instead. However, Figueiredo was adamant: this was his transition to democracy, and the opposition would have a voice, as little as it was, on TV. And that one voice, that one opposition island on a sea of pro-dictatorship networks would have a name: Rede Brasil (3)
Then, on November 15, 1982, after much campaigning by all parties involved, the people went out to vote in massive numbers. This was really no surprise, since, after all, this was the first time they were allowed to directly elect their own governors since 1965. Later that day, the numbers began to pour in, and in the next, several states were called. The counting was supposed to last one week, but there were enough of a tendency to call the states of São Paulo, Paraná, Goiás and Espírito Santo for PMDB in the first three days. Meanwhile, PTB scored a surprising victory in Rio de Janeiro, with Leonel Brizola defeating Sandra Cavalcanti (PDS) by ten points and leaving PMDB's Miro Teixeira in third.
Hooray!
There were a few states whose results were quite surprising: Santa Catarina, Rio Grande do Sul, Pernambuco and Mato Grosso all had the PDS candidates holding narrow leads, despite polling predicting equally narrow PMDB victories. Their counts were also strangely slow: by the time larger states like Rio and São Paulo had one third of their votes counted, in these "fantastic four", as they were called, had less than 15% of their votes were counted. The very counting itself was odd, with pro-PDS places often reporting before a single vote in opposition strongholds was counted. In Rio Grande do Sul, for example, wher Jair Soares had a narrow lead against Simon and Collares, the results of the consevative, pro-PDS interior were known before PMDB and PTB strongholds like Caxias do Sul and the state capital, Porto Alegre. To the PMDB candidates, and other observers, there was only one possible explanation for all this.
Fraud.
The opposition campaigns mounted parallel vote counts, with their results being shown to the country by Jornal do Brasil and, of course, TV Brasil, eager to make its mark. Their counts were much quicker and less onerous than the official ones that were showed by TV Globo, and also put the PMDB candidates ahead of their opponents. As time went by, the irregularities became more and more apparent, catching the attention of not only the whole country, but also international newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Even foreign heads of government and other important personalities, like former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, commented on the elections. Finally, after much noise, TV Globo began showing the corrected numbers on television (4). For many, their slowness to recognize that said irregularities even existed showed that Roberto Marinho tried to steal four elections simultaneously. As such, Globo's reputation as a credible news source inevitably suffered a hit, while the recently created TV Brasil began to grow, thanks to the large number of people who turned to their channel to see the vote counts. They could finally stand on their own. Marinho and some PDS politicians' attempts to convince president Figueiredo to terminate this rival TV station after the whole debacle fell on deaf ears. He, to put it nicely, didn't care about things like these anymore. He just wanted to finish his term, retire, and be forgotten (5).
Now, for those results as a whole...
The São Paulo gubernatorial candidates. From left to right: Lula (PT), Reynaldo de Barros (PDS) and Franco Montoro (PMDB).
It was a bloodbath. A complete, absolute erasure of PDS all over the country, except the Northeast. Even in that region, the opposition had a victory in the state of Pernambuco, one of the "fantastic four". Their greatest victory, without a doubt, was São Paulo, where PMDB candidate Franco Montoro obliterated PDS candidate Reynaldo de Barros by a 55-21 percent margin. PTB scored only one, crucial victory, Leonel Brizola in Rio de Janeiro, one of the richest and most populous states in the country.
Complete and utter annihilation...
The only state where PT won more than 5% of the vote was São Paulo, where gubernatorial candidate Lula got a respectable 18% of the vote. He achieved this number thanks to the votes of the ABC, winning the cities there by a slim margin over Montoro. This meant that most of those cities elected petista mayors, thanks to the bound vote. These mayors, particularly Santo André's Celso Daniel (6), would become models and examples to be followed, appearing in the party's TV ads all over the contry in future elections (7).
Santo André mayor and future star (no pun intended) Celso Daniel.
As for Rio Grande do Sul? Well, PMDB candidate Pedro Simon did win a very tight victory, less than one percent ahead of... Alceu Collares. Yes, you read that right. Poor Jair Soares was stuck third place. For Pernambuco's Roberto Magalhães, the defeat wasn't as embarassing, but still a stinging one.
The opposition sweep was also felt in Brasília, thanks to the bound vote. It seemed that this law, invented to be a hurdle to the opposition, turned on its creators. Thanks to that, PDS lost the majority it once held in the Chamber of Deputies, where none other than Ulysess Guimarães would later be elected president of said house. The only reason they still held the Senate was the fact that only one third of it was renovated, and the "bionic" (appointed) senators chosen in 1978.
Election results as a whole:
Governors:
AC: Nabor Júnior (PMDB) AL: Divaldo Suruagy (PDS) AM: Gilberto Mestrinho (PMDB) BA: Clériston Andrade (PDS)
CE: Gonzaga Mota (PDS) ES: Gerson Camata (PMDB) GO: Iris Rezende (PMDB) MA: Luís Rocha (PDS)
MT: Raimundo Pombo (PMDB)* MS: Wilson Martins (PMDB) MG: Hélio Garcia (PMDB) PA: Jader Barbalho (PMDB)
PB: Wilson Braga (PDS) PR: José Richa (PMDB) PE: Marcos Freire (PMDB)* PI: Hugo Napoleão (PDS)
RJ: Leonel Brizola (PTB) RN: Agripino Maia (PDS) RS: Pedro Simon (PMDB)* SC: Jaison Barreto (PMDB)*
SP: Franco Montoro (PMDB) SE: João Alves Filho (PDS)
Senators:
AC: Mário Maia (PMDB) AL: Guilherme Palmeira (PDS) AM:Fábio Lucena (PMDB)
BA: Luís Viana Filho (PDS) CE : Virgílio Távora (PDS) ES: José Ignácio Ferreira (PMDB)
GO: Mauro Borges (PMDB) MA: João Castelo (PDS) MT: José Garcia Neto (PMDB)*
MS: Marcelo Miranda (PMDB) MG: Itamar Franco (PMDB) PA: Hélio Gueiros (PMDB)
PB: Marcondes Gadelha (PDS) PR: Álvaro Dias (PMDB) PE: Cid Sampaio (PMDB)*
PI: João Lobo (PDS) RJ: Saturnino Braga (PTB) RN: Carlos Alberto (PDS)
RS: Paulo Brossard (PMDB)* SC: Pedro Ivo Campos (PMDB)*
SP: Almino Afonso (PMDB) SE: Albano Franco (PDS)
*Members of the "Fantastic Four"
Chamber of Deputies:
PMDB: 225
PDS: 200
PTB:35
PT:19
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Notes:
(1) IOTL, Brizola was the one who said this quote, since he was the one who almost got his victory stolen by Marinho.
(2) This was what happened OTL. PMDB won ten races, and PDT one. PDS won twelve governorships.
(3) And here's where @Dan1988's contribution comes in. Thanks to several discussions I had with him, I found out that there were 4 main contenders for TV Tupi's corpse: Grupo Silvio Santos (pro-government, won OTL and founded SBT), Abril (owner of the Veja magazine, pro-opposition), Grupo Bloch (who won OTL and created Rede Manchete, pro-government) and Jornal do Brasil (pro-opposition). Here, instead of giving the two halves of Tupi to pro-government groups, he gives one half to the opposition (Jornal do Brasil, who created TTL's Rede Brasil) as part of his transition to democracy. Much to Roberto Marinho's despair.
(4) IOTL, this happened in Rio de Janeiro, and became known as the Proconsult Case. It happened almost exactly as described in the story. While it doesn't occur in RJ ITTL, since Brizola's victory is just too big to steal, it happens in the "Fantastic Four".
(5) Translation: "F*ck this, f*ck you all, I don't care about this sh*t anymore." A side effect from the scandals of past year.
(6) IOTL, Celso Daniel ran for mayor in 1982, but was defeated. The only mayor PT elected IOTL was Gilson Menezes, in Diadema, also in the ABC. Here, thanks to a better result by Lula (he won 10% IOTL) PT wins in São Bernardo, São Caetano and Santo André as well. This means that they start with four mayors, rather than just one, allowing the party to become a relevant electoral force not just in São Paulo, but nationwide, a few years earlier.
(7) Expect these mayors, Celso Daniel in particular, to be treated like Olívio Dutra in Porto Alegre was: big, shiny models to be put on display to prove how great PT is.
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Part 8: Fighting on Two Fronts: The 1982 Elections
"Only fraud can defeat us." --Pedro Simon, PMDB candidate for the governorship of Rio Grande do Sul (1).
Everyone knew, long before election season began, that the opposition would gain several million more votes than PDS. Not even the most ardent government supporters doubted that. However, that wasn't the whole story, for the opposition had several hurdles to overcome. First was the fact that electoral coalitions were forbidden, ensuring that their vote would be split among several candidates. This was especially apparent in Rio Grande do Sul, where gubernatorial candidates Pedro Simon (PMDB) and Alceu Collares (PTB), split the votes among themselves, giving PDS candidate Jair Soares a chance to win: All he needed was to do was gain a little more than 35% of the vote, with the other two candidates coming short thanks to their division.
There was also the "bound vote" (explained in the chapter before this one) that ensured that hundreds of thousands of votes were nullified either because they didn't vote for the entire party of their choice or forgot to fill in one of the blanks. This meant that several potential opposition votes ere almost literally thrown into a trash bin. The PDS candidates were also favored by the fact that nearly all the incumbent governors were fellow party members, giving them a chance to use the state public machines to turbine their campaigns (this was technically illegal, but nobody who really mattered cared). As such, even if they got fewer votes than PMDB, PTB and PT, PDS could still gain more governorships (2).
That wasn't the end of it. They also had to fight on the media front, and most of the TV networks and stations were in pro-government hands. The most powerful of all was the mighty TV Globo, controlled by Roberto Marinho, who also owned a newspaper and a radio station with the same name. A man who supported the dictatorship since before it began, actively endorsing the 1964 coup against president João Goulart. Rede Globo and its other media counterparts could be trusted not to be critical of the government. There was also SBT, one of two TV networks created after the end of TV Tupi, Brazil's first television station, which was caused by several crises after the death of its founder, fromer Paraíba senator Assis Chateaubriand. This part of Tupi was owned by Silvio Santos, another pro-government media baron, who also had political ambitions of his own.
Santos had control over only one half of Tupi's corpse. The other half was, surprisingly, given not to the equally pro-government Grupo Bloch, but to Jornal do Brasil, a newspaper that was very critical of the regime. In hindsight, one can see that this "bipartisan" division (one pro-government half, one opposition half) was not so surprising, given the trend towards liberalization controlled by president Figueiredo. Roberto Marinho was very alarmed by this development, since Jornal do Brasil already owned a newspaper (of course) and a radio station (Rádio JB). A TV channel under its control, even a token one, would turn JB into a serious threat to his Globo empire. He repeatedly asked the president to rethink this decision, and hand the concession to Bloch instead. However, Figueiredo was adamant: this was his transition to democracy, and the opposition would have a voice, as little as it was, on TV. And that one voice, that one opposition island on a sea of pro-dictatorship networks would have a name: Rede Brasil (3)
Then, on November 15, 1982, after much campaigning by all parties involved, the people went out to vote in massive numbers. This was really no surprise, since, after all, this was the first time they were allowed to directly elect their own governors since 1965. Later that day, the numbers began to pour in, and in the next, several states were called. The counting was supposed to last one week, but there were enough of a tendency to call the states of São Paulo, Paraná, Goiás and Espírito Santo for PMDB in the first three days. Meanwhile, PTB scored a surprising victory in Rio de Janeiro, with Leonel Brizola defeating Sandra Cavalcanti (PDS) by ten points and leaving PMDB's Miro Teixeira in third.
Hooray!
There were a few states whose results were quite surprising: Santa Catarina, Rio Grande do Sul, Pernambuco and Mato Grosso all had the PDS candidates holding narrow leads, despite polling predicting equally narrow PMDB victories. Their counts were also strangely slow: by the time larger states like Rio and São Paulo had one third of their votes counted, in these "fantastic four", as they were called, had less than 15% of their votes were counted. The very counting itself was odd, with pro-PDS places often reporting before a single vote in opposition strongholds was counted. In Rio Grande do Sul, for example, wher Jair Soares had a narrow lead against Simon and Collares, the results of the consevative, pro-PDS interior were known before PMDB and PTB strongholds like Caxias do Sul and the state capital, Porto Alegre. To the PMDB candidates, and other observers, there was only one possible explanation for all this.
Fraud.
The opposition campaigns mounted parallel vote counts, with their results being shown to the country by Jornal do Brasil and, of course, TV Brasil, eager to make its mark. Their counts were much quicker and less onerous than the official ones that were showed by TV Globo, and also put the PMDB candidates ahead of their opponents. As time went by, the irregularities became more and more apparent, catching the attention of not only the whole country, but also international newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Even foreign heads of government and other important personalities, like former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, commented on the elections. Finally, after much noise, TV Globo began showing the corrected numbers on television (4). For many, their slowness to recognize that said irregularities even existed showed that Roberto Marinho tried to steal four elections simultaneously. As such, Globo's reputation as a credible news source inevitably suffered a hit, while the recently created TV Brasil began to grow, thanks to the large number of people who turned to their channel to see the vote counts. They could finally stand on their own. Marinho and some PDS politicians' attempts to convince president Figueiredo to terminate this rival TV station after the whole debacle fell on deaf ears. He, to put it nicely, didn't care about things like these anymore. He just wanted to finish his term, retire, and be forgotten (5).
Now, for those results as a whole...
The São Paulo gubernatorial candidates. From left to right: Lula (PT), Reynaldo de Barros (PDS) and Franco Montoro (PMDB).
It was a bloodbath. A complete, absolute erasure of PDS all over the country, except the Northeast. Even in that region, the opposition had a victory in the state of Pernambuco, one of the "fantastic four". Their greatest victory, without a doubt, was São Paulo, where PMDB candidate Franco Montoro obliterated PDS candidate Reynaldo de Barros by a 55-21 percent margin. PTB scored only one, crucial victory, Leonel Brizola in Rio de Janeiro, one of the richest and most populous states in the country.
Complete and utter annihilation...
The only state where PT won more than 5% of the vote was São Paulo, where gubernatorial candidate Lula got a respectable 18% of the vote. He achieved this number thanks to the votes of the ABC, winning the cities there by a slim margin over Montoro. This meant that most of those cities elected petista mayors, thanks to the bound vote. These mayors, particularly Santo André's Celso Daniel (6), would become models and examples to be followed, appearing in the party's TV ads all over the contry in future elections (7).
Santo André mayor and future star (no pun intended) Celso Daniel.
As for Rio Grande do Sul? Well, PMDB candidate Pedro Simon did win a very tight victory, less than one percent ahead of... Alceu Collares. Yes, you read that right. Poor Jair Soares was stuck third place. For Pernambuco's Roberto Magalhães, the defeat wasn't as embarassing, but still a stinging one.
The opposition sweep was also felt in Brasília, thanks to the bound vote. It seemed that this law, invented to be a hurdle to the opposition, turned on its creators. Thanks to that, PDS lost the majority it once held in the Chamber of Deputies, where none other than Ulysess Guimarães would later be elected president of said house. The only reason they still held the Senate was the fact that only one third of it was renovated, and the "bionic" (appointed) senators chosen in 1978.
Election results as a whole:
Governors:
AC: Nabor Júnior (PMDB) AL: Divaldo Suruagy (PDS) AM: Gilberto Mestrinho (PMDB) BA: Clériston Andrade (PDS)
CE: Gonzaga Mota (PDS) ES: Gerson Camata (PMDB) GO: Iris Rezende (PMDB) MA: Luís Rocha (PDS)
MT: Raimundo Pombo (PMDB)* MS: Wilson Martins (PMDB) MG: Hélio Garcia (PMDB) PA: Jader Barbalho (PMDB)
PB: Wilson Braga (PDS) PR: José Richa (PMDB) PE: Marcos Freire (PMDB)* PI: Hugo Napoleão (PDS)
RJ: Leonel Brizola (PTB) RN: Agripino Maia (PDS) RS: Pedro Simon (PMDB)* SC: Jaison Barreto (PMDB)*
SP: Franco Montoro (PMDB) SE: João Alves Filho (PDS)
Senators:
AC: Mário Maia (PMDB) AL: Guilherme Palmeira (PDS) AM:Fábio Lucena (PMDB)
BA: Luís Viana Filho (PDS) CE : Virgílio Távora (PDS) ES: José Ignácio Ferreira (PMDB)
GO: Mauro Borges (PMDB) MA: João Castelo (PDS) MT: José Garcia Neto (PMDB)*
MS: Marcelo Miranda (PMDB) MG: Itamar Franco (PMDB) PA: Hélio Gueiros (PMDB)
PB: Marcondes Gadelha (PDS) PR: Álvaro Dias (PMDB) PE: Cid Sampaio (PMDB)*
PI: João Lobo (PDS) RJ: Saturnino Braga (PTB) RN: Carlos Alberto (PDS)
RS: Paulo Brossard (PMDB)* SC: Pedro Ivo Campos (PMDB)*
SP: Almino Afonso (PMDB) SE: Albano Franco (PDS)
*Members of the "Fantastic Four"
Chamber of Deputies:
PMDB: 225
PDS: 200
PTB:35
PT:19
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Notes:
(1) IOTL, Brizola was the one who said this quote, since he was the one who almost got his victory stolen by Marinho.
(2) This was what happened OTL. PMDB won ten races, and PDT one. PDS won twelve governorships.
(3) And here's where @Dan1988's contribution comes in. Thanks to several discussions I had with him, I found out that there were 4 main contenders for TV Tupi's corpse: Grupo Silvio Santos (pro-government, won OTL and founded SBT), Abril (owner of the Veja magazine, pro-opposition), Grupo Bloch (who won OTL and created Rede Manchete, pro-government) and Jornal do Brasil (pro-opposition). Here, instead of giving the two halves of Tupi to pro-government groups, he gives one half to the opposition (Jornal do Brasil, who created TTL's Rede Brasil) as part of his transition to democracy. Much to Roberto Marinho's despair.
(4) IOTL, this happened in Rio de Janeiro, and became known as the Proconsult Case. It happened almost exactly as described in the story. While it doesn't occur in RJ ITTL, since Brizola's victory is just too big to steal, it happens in the "Fantastic Four".
(5) Translation: "F*ck this, f*ck you all, I don't care about this sh*t anymore." A side effect from the scandals of past year.
(6) IOTL, Celso Daniel ran for mayor in 1982, but was defeated. The only mayor PT elected IOTL was Gilson Menezes, in Diadema, also in the ABC. Here, thanks to a better result by Lula (he won 10% IOTL) PT wins in São Bernardo, São Caetano and Santo André as well. This means that they start with four mayors, rather than just one, allowing the party to become a relevant electoral force not just in São Paulo, but nationwide, a few years earlier.
(7) Expect these mayors, Celso Daniel in particular, to be treated like Olívio Dutra in Porto Alegre was: big, shiny models to be put on display to prove how great PT is.
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I may have helped, but you did all the work and it turned out marvellous!
