It was May 1985, just two months after the inauguration of, Brazil’s first civil president after, which began in 1964. At that time, on the 15th, it was promulgated that it would be one of the symbols of the country’s redemocratization.
In the heat of events, it might be difficult to see the size of that change. Now, looking in retrospective, it is possible to say that the amendment has influenced, to some extent, points of the 1988 formulation. It also impacted the way politicians started to campaign.
The established changes? Election by direct vote of the population and the right to vote for illiterate people, among others.
“It is one of the main achievements of the redemocratization process because it was the first time in history, since 1881, when it had a reform of the Brazilian Electoral Code, that the illiterate could vote,” says political scientist Ivan Fernandes.
Professor at UFABC (Federal University of ABC), he recalls that even before the 1964 coup, several periods are called democratic. However, Brazil left out of the electoral process much of the population because it considered that illiterate people were unable to choose the representatives.
At the time of the military coup, for example, Brazil had a 39.6% illiteracy rate among people aged 15 or older, according to IBGE.
“The moment the illiterate begins to have this right to vote and begin to participate, the political system quickly focuses on this electorate. Therefore, the construction of a social protection system that takes the poor into account,” says Fernandes, who cites the creation of SUS (Unified Health System) and the search for universalization of public.
The two examples remembered by him were instituted in the Constitution. The letter replaced the one in force in the military regime and consolidated the redemocratization process.
According to the teacher, the 1985 amendment put “the bottom floor” in the electoral process and made the parties have to compete by vote of these illiterate voters.
Prepared three years later, the 1988 Constitution had reflected in some of its proposals the new scenario of transformations in which the amendment was inserted.
The amendment that instituted direct vote and illiterate vote, however, was not the only process that occurred at that time and which had influence on the country’s political and legal developments in the following years.
Fernandes also cites the income transfer projects, emerged in the later decades. For him, a greater interest of the rulers on the subject is also related to the change of profile of those who vote in the elections, although not the only factor.
The right of illiterate people vote for existence in Brazil, even for a short time, in the colonial period. During the Empire, however, the illiterate vote was abolished in 1881, eight years before the proclamation of the Republic.
In the following decades, the debate on the possibility of illiterate participating in that of political representatives returned to Baila, sometimes, until in 1985 amendment No. 25 was promulgated.
The first change that the measure generated was practical. Candidates were also identified by numbers to facilitate the participation of all voters. It is simpler for an illiterate person to remember the numbers.
Data from the last election held in Brazil in 2024, point out that the country still has 5.5 million illiterate voters, according to the TSE (Superior Electoral Court).
The illiterates debuted in the November 1985 election, the first election after the choice of capital mayors. At the time, the country had 19 million illiterate, according to Senate data.
One of the advantages of the amendment, according to the professor of law at UFPA (Federal University of Pará) Luiz Alberto Rocha, is that it institutionally qualified the illiterate as voter. The change did not change prejudice regarding the quality of the vote of the illiterate. In practice, however, this group can do an analysis of the missing public policies in their daily lives.
“You have an important institutional legal passage. The representation of the illiterate vote takes this person out of the shadow, as if it were a ‘smaller Brazilian’,” says Rocha.
“The illiterate is resistance to this day. So much so that the illiterate has what we call active electoral capacity, it can vote, but it has no passive electoral capacity, that is, it cannot be voted.”
He states that the possibility of illiterate vote appeared the towing the mobilization by direct vote. The ones had demonstrations scattered throughout Brazil.
With the approach of the end of the military dictatorship, the debates for the right to direct vote for the entire population intensified, and the vote for the illiterate entered these negotiations of the democratic transition.
For Luigi Bonizzato, professor of law at UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), the amendment represents a milestone from the legal and political point of view.
“An important question of being highlighted is the strengthening of political parties. Registration in a party so that a person can apply for any elective public office also comes present in Amendment No. 25 and is essential for us to think of a democratic state that still embryoly there was trying to create itself,” he says.
According to Bonizzato, the party is of importance in democratic logic because it facilitates any citizen’s access to the official political system. The amendment, in a way, had a role of sacrament symbolic and legal elements of the democratic transition.
