So, Motta explicitly says he wants it done this year, and in Brazil, presidents and others assume their mandates literally on New Years day*, so he specifically means in this quasi lame duck...
Exemplary
Speaker Hugo Motta (Republicans Party) announced Wednesday (Oct. 28) that Brazil's Lower House plans to vote on changes to the country's electoral rules before the end of the year. The proposal would replace the current proportional representation system with a mixed-member electoral model. If approved by Congress, the new system would take full effect in 2034.
Motta announced the initiative after meeting with representatives of several political parties, primarily from the center, which have been losing ground to the Liberal Party (PL) and its candidates' strong electoral performance. Supporters of the proposal also see the new system as a way to make it harder for candidates linked to organized crime, social media influencers and anti-establishment figures to win office.
“We will talk to every party represented in the Chamber. The idea is to hold this discussion with a view to 2034,” Motta said, without providing details on how the transition would work in the 2030 elections.
How the systems differ
Brazil currently uses an open-list proportional representation system, based on an electoral quotient, to elect federal, state and Federal District deputies and municipal council members. Under this model, each party or electoral federation receives a number of seats proportional to the combined votes cast for its candidates and the party itself.
The system also allows for the emergence of so-called vote magnets—candidates whose strong electoral performances help elect others from the same party.
So, Motta explicitly says he wants it done this year, and in Brazil, presidents and others assume their mandates literally on New Years day*, so he specifically means in this quasi lame duck period his party has before it loses 20 seats to PL. This feels like a bit of a hurried and somewhat desperate move overall, and basically everyone acknowledges this is being brought up so Centrão parties like Republicanos can hold on to their power.
However, people have many dislikes with the current type of proportional system we use in our elections, so despite the nakedly selfish motives, many people would be quite happy with a reform. Open lists are always a bit of a mess, and the Vote Magnet phenomenon mentioned in the article was the strongest it has ever been in our country's history. The largest example was Nikolas Ferreira, who singlehandedly won 3 million votes in Minas Gerais, over a quarter of the entire state electorate and two thirds of his entire party's electorate, carrying a whopping 15 out of all 21 Liberal Party deputies in the State. Having a political party electing basically an entire delegation with just a single guy is really unbalanced and you definitely don't need to be a Centrão politician to want this to end. Their stated proposal seemingly is some sort of Mixed system, where vote magnets/carriers like Nikolas will either be contained to one singular house district where they can presumably only elect themselves, or they will be slotted into a closed party list and voters won't be able to vote for them specifically, only the party as a whole. This latter effect could be a good change, swapping personal loyalty to partisan and ideological loyalty could move our electoral politics in a more European direction, where each party represents a specific set of political beliefs instead of there being parties which are just a web of interpersonal alliances and often clientelistic local leaders (which is ironic considering the parties proposing this are the personalistic ones who might struggle under such a system, even if they really do get to take long-term control of their desired electoral districts indefinitely.)
However, the devil is in the details, and the particulars of the implementation would make all the difference. In Germany, the closed list half of the parliament is heavily compensated to make up for the very high levels of non-proportionality of the FPTP half to guarantee the final makeup of parliament is proportional, and district electeds whose pluralities are too small are literally barred from getting elected if the party has benefited too much from FPTP. This is not an obligation and Mixed Member Majoritarian systems have artificially created massive parliamentary majorities out of modest or even thin pluralities like in Japan, and is the electoral system Fidesz infamously chose to help cement it's dictatorial power in Hungary, which it very much did. Some people just heard there were going to be electoral districts wrongly assumed these guys just want to turn Brazil's electoral system into a copy of the American one, but the effect of ending proportional elections in Brazil wouldn't be any better. If anything, allowing fragmentation to stay via the proportional lit might be even worse.
Lastly, Brazil isn't the best of countries to turn into districts. The current proposal would be to divide Brazil into ~256 electoral districts (half the current amount), which is not even 60% of the US house, which is already way too small. The extreme example is the state of Amazonas, which is over a million square kilometers, while the other 4 seats are distributed vaguely proportionally (at increments of 25% each), but the average electoral district would contain 840 thousand people and span something like 30 thousand square kilometers, which is even worse than in America and would IMO yield very American results, as opposed to yielding small local fiefdoms that can be easily controlled.
Lastly, the transition period that is mentioned to actually be for the next election 2030 is yet to be defined and people are speculating the interim electoral system will be something like "Distritão", a very simple electoral system which is like FPTP, but for the top 10 most voted in the state. This proposal has already shown up a few times previously and has consistently been voted down because it's not proportional and benefits high name recognition.
Overall, neither PT (Lula's party) nor PL (Bolsonarism's party) are very enthused by the idea and they're the 2 largest parties, so it's not particularly likely it makes it to the 3/5ths majority required to become a constitutional amendment, but as someone who constantly follows US politics and has accumulated a lot of knowledge and opinions about electoral systems as a consequence of their problems, I feel very strongly about this type of proposal and hope proportional representation is maintained if the electoral system really is changed.
Article content note
At the bottom of this article, Valor Econômico says they used AI to translate this article and ran the result by their editorial team to make sure it made sense. The article does indeed make sense when reading it and I honestly didn't even notice this disclaimer until today, but it's pretty embarrassing that they decided to reduce their translators to basically checking an LLM's job doing their job in the name of efficiency. Anyway, you have been warned.
*
Apparently, they passed a bill a few years back changing this to January 5th for reasons when it used to be literally in New Years. Okay I guess.
So, Motta explicitly says he wants it done this year, and in Brazil, presidents and others assume their mandates literally on New Years day*, so he specifically means in this quasi lame duck period his party has before it loses 20 seats to PL. This feels like a bit of a hurried and somewhat desperate move overall, and basically everyone acknowledges this is being brought up so Centrão parties like Republicanos can hold on to their power.
However, people have many dislikes with the current type of proportional system we use in our elections, so despite the nakedly selfish motives, many people would be quite happy with a reform. Open lists are always a bit of a mess, and the Vote Magnet phenomenon mentioned in the article was the strongest it has ever been in our country's history. The largest example was Nikolas Ferreira, who singlehandedly won 3 million votes in Minas Gerais, over a quarter of the entire state electorate and two thirds of his entire party's electorate, carrying a whopping 15 out of all 21 Liberal Party deputies in the State. Having a political party electing basically an entire delegation with just a single guy is really unbalanced and you definitely don't need to be a Centrão politician to want this to end. Their stated proposal seemingly is some sort of Mixed system, where vote magnets/carriers like Nikolas will either be contained to one singular house district where they can presumably only elect themselves, or they will be slotted into a closed party list and voters won't be able to vote for them specifically, only the party as a whole. This latter effect could be a good change, swapping personal loyalty to partisan and ideological loyalty could move our electoral politics in a more European direction, where each party represents a specific set of political beliefs instead of there being parties which are just a web of interpersonal alliances and often clientelistic local leaders (which is ironic considering the parties proposing this are the personalistic ones who might struggle under such a system, even if they really do get to take long-term control of their desired electoral districts indefinitely.)
However, the devil is in the details, and the particulars of the implementation would make all the difference. In Germany, the closed list half of the parliament is heavily compensated to make up for the very high levels of non-proportionality of the FPTP half to guarantee the final makeup of parliament is proportional, and district electeds whose pluralities are too small are literally barred from getting elected if the party has benefited too much from FPTP. This is not an obligation and Mixed Member Majoritarian systems have artificially created massive parliamentary majorities out of modest or even thin pluralities like in Japan, and is the electoral system Fidesz infamously chose to help cement it's dictatorial power in Hungary, which it very much did. Some people just heard there were going to be electoral districts wrongly assumed these guys just want to turn Brazil's electoral system into a copy of the American one, but the effect of ending proportional elections in Brazil wouldn't be any better. If anything, allowing fragmentation to stay via the proportional lit might be even worse.
Lastly, Brazil isn't the best of countries to turn into districts. The current proposal would be to divide Brazil into ~256 electoral districts (half the current amount), which is not even 60% of the US house, which is already way too small. The extreme example is the state of Amazonas, which is over a million square kilometers, while the other 4 seats are distributed vaguely proportionally (at increments of 25% each), but the average electoral district would contain 840 thousand people and span something like 30 thousand square kilometers, which is even worse than in America and would IMO yield very American results, as opposed to yielding small local fiefdoms that can be easily controlled.
Lastly, the transition period that is mentioned to actually be for the next election 2030 is yet to be defined and people are speculating the interim electoral system will be something like "Distritão", a very simple electoral system which is like FPTP, but for the top 10 most voted in the state. This proposal has already shown up a few times previously and has consistently been voted down because it's not proportional and benefits high name recognition.
Overall, neither PT (Lula's party) nor PL (Bolsonarism's party) are very enthused by the idea and they're the 2 largest parties, so it's not particularly likely it makes it to the 3/5ths majority required to become a constitutional amendment, but as someone who constantly follows US politics and has accumulated a lot of knowledge and opinions about electoral systems as a consequence of their problems, I feel very strongly about this type of proposal and hope proportional representation is maintained if the electoral system really is changed.
Article content note
At the bottom of this article, Valor Econômico says they used AI to translate this article and ran the result by their editorial team to make sure it made sense. The article does indeed make sense when reading it and I honestly didn't even notice this disclaimer until today, but it's pretty embarrassing that they decided to reduce their translators to basically checking an LLM's job doing their job in the name of efficiency. Anyway, you have been warned.
*
Apparently, they passed a bill a few years back changing this to January 5th for reasons when it used to be literally in New Years. Okay I guess.