Democracy is famously described as one person, one vote, and the final part of the electoral equation is so obvious it does not need saying: one winner.
But that formula is being challenged in Brazil this year, where a new wave of what are called collective candidacies are shaking up the traditional way of doing politics.
Collective candidacies involve several people with a common platform running for office together with a promise to share the duties of office. Many of them feature minorities, and almost all boast participants who bring vastly different skills to a ticket.
In Santa Catarina state, 10 young activists have formed a group they call Lula Youth, in tribute to the leftist former president. The Pedro Ivo Collective in Brasília has eight members seeking a senate seat, including a psychology student, a journalist and a member of the Tukano Indigenous tribe. And in São Paulo, five Afro-Brazilian feminists are campaigning for state legislature under the slogan, “Cast One Vote, Get Five Black Women”.
“It is a way of hacking the political system,” said Evorah Cardoso, a researcher for the campaigning NGO VoteLGBT. “According to Brazilian law, only one person can occupy the elected seat. But promise of the campaign is that it will be a collective mandate.”
In practice, that means participants share campaign duties and costs, and salaries and benefits if they win. They must also decide how to divide administrative and legislative work, outreach and media appearances.
Some date the experiment back to the Stockholm suburb of Vallentuna at the turn of the millennium.
The first examples in Brazil came a few years later, but the collective candidacies have taken off this year.
Although there are no official figures, a TV Globo count said there were at least 213 in this year’s elections for senate, congress and state legislatures, up from an estimated 98 in 2018. Of those, 22 won their races, according to Arlindo Fernandes de Oliveira, a senate legal expert who has studied the movement.
“If you look at the number of collective campaigns that are successful, the percentage of those that win is higher than that of normal candidacies,” said Oliveira.
Lukas Nunes Lima, a 27-year-old PE teacher sharing a platform with Luiza, a transgender cleaner; Sheila, a presenter of cultural events; and Leda, a psychology lecturer, said shared candidacies were a quick way to understand issues and gain political experience.
“I don’t know much about LGBT issues and Luiza brings that to the table and teaches us all, as Sheila does with culture, and Leda does with education,” Lima said of their bid to win a seat on the Brasília legislature.
“It’s an incredible apprenticeship. Even if we don’t win, I’ve learned so much already.”
The diversity of their slate is not unusual. Collective campaigns are seen as a great way for minorities to challenge incumbent and better-funded candidates.
Most position themselves on the left and the vast majority feature Black, Indigenous, transgender or female representatives. This year, 63 alone feature an LGBT presence, according to Cardoso.
One of the slickest is for the Feminist Bench, a group of five black women running for a seat in the São Paulo state legislature. Backed by the leftwing PSOL party, the ticket is unusual in having experienced politicians on board.
One of the five, Paula Nunes, was part of the five-member team that won election to the São Paulo city council in 2020, and she and a colleague on that ticket have split off to head another group bidding for a seat in the state chamber.
The goal, she said, was not just to win, but to win and then link the two mandates, giving black women a more cohesive voice in São Paulo politics.
“We have five black women in the city council,” she said. “In the whole history of the council, there were only ever four black women elected before us. That is nothing compared to the number of black women in the state and country.”
The candidacies do not come without risks.
Participants warn that political alignment is just as important as being friends, and say groups must clearly delineate their responsibilities before setting out.
One of the most celebrated collectives, a group of nine people elected to the São Paulo city council in 2018, hit the headlines after it expelled one member for breaking the group’s collective responsibility.
So far, however, such ruptures are rare, and Nunes said they can be avoided with clear planning.
“People say we are making it up when we tell them we don’t fight, but it’s because our idea was not to find five women to stand together, it was to find five women who are aligned politically,” the lawyer said. “We know what we want to focus on and so there is little dissidence.”
She added: “I think collective campaigns are here to stay. From now, I don’t think you’ll be able to say that politics in Brazil will not be done collectively.”
