In 2026, 50 years will have passed since the infamous “Falcão Law”, legislation imposed by the military regime that restricted electoral propaganda and which was in force until the 1985 municipal dispute, when Brazil was already in a consolidated process of re-democratization.
The Electoral Propaganda Reform Bill was nicknamed the “Falcão Law” because it was presented and defended by the then Minister of Justice, Armando Falcão, during the presidency of General Ernesto Geisel.
Arena, the government party, felt the need to change advertising rules after suffering a heavy defeat in the 1974 legislative elections, when the MDB, the only opposition party, won 2/3 of the seats up for grabs in the Senate. The reading was that the emedebistas had made much better use of the space on radio and TV channels and explored problems such as the growing inflation of the period.
The MDB won 15 of the 22 seats up for grabs in the Senate and 161 of the 364 seats (44%) of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies, with great strength in the Southeastern States. By holding more than a third of the Chamber, the MDB acquired the right to request parliamentary commissions of inquiry and actually exercise the role of opposition, something that had been done with many restrictions since the 1964 military coup.
With the imminent risk of losing its parliamentary majority, the government began to act to extend its hegemony. In addition to the “Falcão Law”, which came into force for the 1976 municipal elections, Geisel also promoted political reform the following year, creating indirect elections for a third of the Senate, the so-called “bionic senators”.
According to newspapers at the time, the government used an event from the 1974 campaign as justification for creating a law of silence in the following elections. On the last day of the political program before the 1974 parliamentary elections, Arena showed graphs and statistics to justify the “scarcity” of food in the country.
Then, on the MDB program, Gaucho deputy Getúlio Dias took advantage of the space to make a joke: “a man catches six fish for lunch, but has to return them to the river because his wife had not been able to buy oil or gas for cooking. Upon diving back into the water, one of the fish celebrates: ‘”Long live the Brazilian revolution of 1964!’.
The story, told in a mocking tone, inflamed government politicians and ended up being used as justification for the imposition of the “Falcão Law”.
Law No. 6,339/1976, approved by the National Congress on June 23 and sanctioned by the president on July 1, stipulated that parties would limit themselves from then on to mentioning in their propaganda only the party’s party, CV and candidates’ registration number with the Electoral Court. Only photographs could be shown on TV, with the CV read by an announcer.
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The effect of the new law was felt in the 1978 election, when Arena obtained 12 million votes against 10 million for the MDB. But it did not prevent the opposition from advancing in the 1972 municipal elections, when the opposition received less than 7 million votes, compared to more than 15 million for Arena, which had then won 90% of the city councils.
It is worth remembering that, at the time, the capitals and 142 other municipalities were considered “national security”, where there were only elections for councilors. In other words, more than 7 million voters (25% of the total) were prohibited from voting for mayor.
The “Falcão Law” was suspended in 1985, during the regulation of the first municipal elections in the country after redemocratization. But it was only in 1997, with the approval of the Electoral Law, that the “law of silence” was removed from the Brazilian legal system.
