When was Brazil’s first direct presidential election after the dictatorship?

Twenty-nine years without a ballot

The last direct presidential election before military rule took place in 1960 and put Jânio Quadros in office. He resigned in August 1961, and his vice-president, João Goulart, was overthrown by the coup of 1964. Days later, Congress elected General Castelo Branco. On October 27, 1965, Institutional Act No. 2, the AI-2, abolished the direct vote for president. From then on, presidents came out of indirect elections, and every one of them was a general chosen by the military themselves.

The streets tried to change that in 1984. The Diretas Já campaign filled the squares, but the amendment for direct elections fell 22 votes short in the Chamber of Deputies. In January 1985 an Electoral College still made the choice, and this time picked a civilian, Tancredo Neves. The country itself had not voted for a president in a generation.

A hundred years after the Republic

The first round fell on a round date: November 15, 1989, the hundredth anniversary of the proclamation of the Republic, the day in 1889 when Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca ended Brazil’s monarchy. More than 20 candidates were on the ballot, among them Ulysses Guimarães, who had chaired the assembly that wrote the 1988 Constitution, and Mário Covas, who had lost his seat in Congress under the AI-5 in 1969.

Many people in line had never done this before. To vote in 1960 you had to be at least 18, so in 1989 no Brazilian under 47 had ever been able to vote for a president. There were newcomers too: 16- and 17-year-olds, allowed to vote by the new Constitution, and illiterate citizens, who had won the right to vote in 1985. Their story is in When did Brazil let 16-year-olds vote?.

An election about prices

Brazil voted in the middle of an economic storm. Since 1986, three plans had frozen prices, the Cruzado, the Bresser and the Summer Plan, and inflation had come back every time. In 1989, the year of the election, prices rose almost 2,000%. People with bank accounts sheltered their money in the overnight market; people who lived on wages had no such shelter. The country wanted someone who could tame prices.

Two rounds, for the first time

The 1988 Constitution added something new to presidential elections: if no candidate won more than half of the valid votes, the top two would meet in a runoff. Until 1960, whoever had the most votes won, even without a majority. In 1989 no one reached half. The two most voted, Fernando Collor and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, went to the second round, and on December 17, 1989, Collor won, with 35 million votes to 31 million. The new president took office on March 15, 1990.

The vote that had lost by 22 votes in 1984 was back, and this time the Constitution protected it from any future amendment.

No proposed amendment tending to abolish […] the direct, secret, universal and periodic vote shall be considered.