- Few presidential candidates embrace the environment as a primary election issue, while parties with openly green agendas often fail to get seats in national legislative bodies.
- Increasingly fragmented electorates have made it difficult to elect a president from the first voting round; elected leaders might frequently not enjoy political majority in their respective parliaments.
- While coalitions provide a potential solution to this fragmentation, they can struggle with corruption and instability.
Realizing the goals of sustainable development and environmental conservation in the Pan Amazon will require profound changes in the region’s legal and economic framework. This type of change can only be obtained via the political process. Fortunately, there is broad support within Amazonian nations for a change in the policies that drive deforestation and unsustainable production systems.
Unfortunately, environmental issues are well down the list of priorities that influence people’s voting preferences. Typically, politicians voice support for protecting the Amazon but avoid making the hard decisions that might change the future.
All the nations of the Pan Amazon have a presidential style of constitutional democracy that delegates significant power to the executive branch, but with checks and balances that allocate varying degrees of power to the legislature to make laws, manage the budget and oversee executive branch actions. The judicial system interprets those laws and, very occasionally, adjudicates disputes between the other two branches.
Occasionally, a country will elect a charismatic president who circumvents the checks and balances to create a regime with authoritarian tendencies. These demagogues often espouse environmental principles, but experience has shown they are false prophets who use climate, biodiversity and Indigenous issues to advance a political agenda based on personal power.
Considering the overweening power of the presidency, it is not unreasonable for environmental activists to hope that a presidential election can lead to fundamental change – but it is unrealistic.
Few presidential candidates embrace the environment as a primary election issue, and those who do have not been particularly successful. For example, Marina Silva has campaigned for president of Brazil three times (2010, 2014, 2018), but failed to make the runoff election – even when her platform included a credible commitment to fight corruption.
Even parties with overt green agendas have enjoyed only limited success in electing members to legislative bodies, but only in proportional representation electoral systems designed specifically to benefit small parties. Although small parties can influence policies by joining coalition governments, substantive change will require leadership from the larger parties that actually head coalitions.
The political ecosystem in each country reflects longstanding cultural traditions and recent historical events. Each country is unique, but there are certain trends that can inform political strategies across countries.
The last two decades of the twentieth century led to the proliferation of political parties as proportional representation disrupted the dominance of legacy parties that held sway over national politics in the previous decades. The fragmented electorate makes it unlikely that any presidential candidate will be elected in the first round of a two-stage voting system.
The runoff vote has proven to be effective for choosing a chief executive, but it also ensures that the newly elected president will not have a legislative majority, because parliamentary composition is determined in the first round of voting and will therefore reflect the unconsolidated representation of the electorate.
A newly elected president must: a) organize a legislative coalition that will support them during their administration; b) rule over a divided government that is inherently weak; or c) wage political combat with opponents seeking to remove them from office. There are very few exceptions to these three scenarios, and only the first tends to bring positive outcomes for a country and its citizens. When that occurs, a multiparty coalition can be beneficial and productive, particularly when it represents a broad slice of society; however, coalition governments can also be extraordinarily unstable and incredibly corrupt.
Banner image: Deforestation in Brazil. Image © Christian Braga/Greenpeace.
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