Election in Brazil depends on agreement on proportionality

The Brazilian Congress is already discussing the rules for the election, by the population, of the next Brazilian representatives in the Mercosur Parliament (Parlasur), whose headquarters are established in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Brazil might elect, in 2010, the Representatives who will represent the country in Parlasur. The rules of this election – the first of its kind in Brazil – must be approved by the Chamber and Senate until the end of September of this year, so that they are in force by 2010.

The Bill 5279/09 of Deputy Carlos Zarattini (PT-SP), which regulates the election, was submitted in May of this year, and had an urgency application requested by Deputy Cândido Vaccarezza (PT-SP), at the beginning of July.

The Rapporteur of the proposal within the Committee on Foreign Relations and National Defence, Deputy Dr. Rosinha (PT-PR), might submit in the coming weeks a clean bill, in which the suggestions of the work group that studied the subject are consolidated. The group was formed by the party leaders and chaired by Deputy Antônio Carlos Magalhães Neto (DEM-BA).

Waiting for definitions
The regulation of the election is related to decisions that depend on the Commom Market Coucil (CMC), the higher decisory instance of Mercosul. They cannot be taken by Brazil alone: they should express a consensus between the four countries that are members of Mercosur - Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, besides Brazil.

Therefore, the rules of the Brazilian elections for Parlasur depend also on the total number of Representatives to be elected by the four countries. The main difficulty has been to define a criterion of proportionality that counteract the asymmetries between the members of the group, whose populations go from about 200 million inhabitants (Brazil) to about 3,5 million (Uruguay).

Parlasur will be established in three stages

Political agreement sets norms for first election

Reporting – Rejane Xavier
Edition – Paulo Cesar Santos
Translation – Grupo Solucion/ Thiago L. Capatti