Direct Elections Now (Diretas Já): the search for democracy and its limits

Abstract

This article analyzes three books on the Direct Elections Now campaign. Beginning with a small demonstration in Goiânia in early 1983, the campaign grew throughout that year, gathering together more than a million people in its final demonstration in January 1984 in the capital of the state of São Paulo. The campaign polarized Brazilian society because it proposed direct election of the President of the Republic, after a long period of civil-military dictatorship. The government was trying to insure that the next president would be elected through an electoral college, while the opposition tried to disrupt that process. Our analysis, based on a Marxist theory of the State, tries to demonstrate the commitment of those efforts to the idea of broadening democratic and citizenship spaces in Brazil, and to underscore the limits that resulted from that choice of strategy.