A Favela-Born Political Up-and-Comer in Brazil
A Favela-Born Political Up-and-Comer in Brazil
By Anna Jean Kaiser
The Daily Dose SEPT 30 2016
On a Friday night just before Rio de Janeiro’s municipal elections, city council candidate Marielle Franco arrives at a warehouse party in her neighborhood of Maré — a favela, a low-income informal settlement, located in Rio’s North Zone. An Afrobeat band sings of the luta (the struggle), racism, machismo. People sport orange stickers bearing outline of an Afroed woman: Franco’s campaign image.
“I am because we are,” her campaign slogan reads, a nod to the African philosophy ubuntu, and a surprisingly telling message. Franco, an up-and-comer in one of Brazil’s new leftist parties, the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), is appealing to locals because of a shared identity. The 37-year-old, who’s making her first run for elected office, is telling a story of a new era of progressivism in Brazil, one that draws on her childhood history growing up in a favela. The Olympic dust has settled; Rio is facing a deepening financial crisis and ever-deteriorating security issues, and all this is cast against the specter of ex-President Dilma Rousseff’s ousting in September after a lengthy impeachment process.
Amid all this, Franco, who’s widely expected to win her election on Sunday, hopes to begin her ascent into the highest echelons of Brazilian politics. Franco and her small but plucky party, which is just 11 years old, see themselves as the counterbalancing force to the current center-right government. They’re calling for wider social safety nets, new public housing projects, community policing.
In addition to her party’s platform, Franco has her own wish list: She wants standard bus routes rewritten so women can get off at designated brighter or safer spaces late at night. She wants more government-funded day care centers so moms can work. As Franco issues many of these calls for change, she uses her personal history expertly to compensate for a lack of experience in elected office. Day care is a case study in this Francoism: Though other politicians have been trying to up the number of centers for years, Franco says they didn’t understand the complex cartographies of the city of 6.5 million, didn’t see the invisible borders drawn by gangs or drug factions that might make a seemingly accessible center dangerous for a mother to reach.
More:
http://www.ozy.com/rising-stars/a-favela-born-political-up-and-comer-in-brazil/72122
