(Reuters) – Cross-dressing, semi-literate, potty-mouthed clowns aren’t supposed to run for Congress. And if they do, they sure as hell aren’t supposed to win. But Francisco Everardo Oliveira Silva—better known by his clown name Tiririca (Grumpy)—broke those rules, and several more, when he ran for Brazil’s House of Deputies in 2010.
Campaigning under the slogan “It Can’t Get Any Worse” and wearing a women’s blonde wig, Tiririca took satirical aim at Brazil’s reviled Congress, where gridlock and corruption are rife. His campaign ads were hugely popular on television and the Internet. “What does a federal congressman do? Truly, I don’t know. But vote for me, and I’ll find out for you,” he promised in one ad. In another, he threatened to kill himself if he didn’t win. In still another, he vowed: “Elect me so I can help the neediest—especially my own family.”
More than 7 million YouTube hits later, Tiririca was elected – with the most votes of any candidate in the history of Brazil’s lower house. The political elite howled in anger, accusing the electorate of playing an infantile and reckless practical joke on a hallowed institution. “Is this a protest vote, or proof that we live in an ignorant society?” one pundit asked. Others sneered that Tiririca, who dropped out of school at age 9 to join a travelling circus, wouldn’t be able to pass the basic reading test required to take office (he did—barely). A few weeks later, Tiririca continued to make headlines when he apparently screwed up his first vote in Congress by pressing the wrong button on a bill to raise the minimum wage.
Tiririca’s political buffoonery might surprise many Europeans and Americans. After all, they seem to have cornered the market on people who despise their legislatures. The approval rating of the US Congress recently hit an all-time low of 9 per cent in one poll, making it less popular than communism, Paris Hilton and even banks. In parts of Europe, the backlash has been harsher still, with parliaments from Greece to the Netherlands to Romania collapsing during the past year. In most cases, the widespread hostility to legislators has been attributed to a merciless mix of austerity measures, tax increases and partisan gridlock that has come to define politics in much of Europe and the United States. Put simply, managing a seemingly never-ending financial crisis is a sure-fire way to piss people off.
How, then, to explain the disdain felt toward legislatures in countries that are booming? The year Tiririca rode the protest vote to victory, Brazil’s economy grew a whopping 7.5 per cent, its best performance in 25 years. In India, which had been enjoying an exceptional run of growth until recently, the parliament has been described as perhaps the most dysfunctional in six decades of democracy. The speaker of South Africa’s legislature got so fed up in May that he publicly berated his colleagues for skipping key votes and drafting unintelligible, unconstitutional laws; a colleague agreed, calling the chamber “boring, dull, and a place of mediocrity.” Despite a decade of strong growth and the slow but steady spread of democracy throughout Africa, a respected magazine recently surveyed the continent’s politics and asked on its cover: “Do parliaments matter?”
It’s tempting to blame all this on a global disenchantment with politicians—and the power elite generally—in this age of Facebook, Twitter and grass-roots activism. Yet the truth is that, in many of these countries, the executive branch remains quite popular, and effective. In Brazil, President Dilma Rousseff has an approval rating near 80 percent, as voters credit her—and her alone, apparently—for record-low unemployment and high-wage growth. More than 73 per cent of Indians describe Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as either “average” or “good.” The same pattern generally holds in the rich world, where, for example, President Barack Obama’s popularity never sank lower than about 38 per cent in the United States, even when his colleagues in Congress were plumbing single digits and challenging Fidel Castro (5 per cent approval) for “Most Hated” status in America.
This all suggests a worldwide crisis of confidence in legislatures. The consequences go beyond just a clown taking office here and there. Brazil’s Congress is so dysfunctional that President Rousseff has built her entire governing strategy around avoiding it as much as possible—even shelving plans for a badly needed reform of the tax code at huge detriment to the economy. Naked obstructionism by Mexico’s legislature has suppressed economic growth there for more than a decade. In the United States, the most significant contribution of Congress over the last year could be summed up by the phrase “fiscal cliff.” Perhaps most dire of all, the inability of Europe’s parliamentary democracies to forge a definitive solution to the euro zone crisis has held the global economy hostage for more than two years.
So what’s wrong with legislatures? And, most important, what can be done about them? On these questions, Tiririca’s story sheds some light. Not the story of his election so much, but what came afterward: the letdown. “This horrible place,” he said in a frank, surprisingly sober interview, “nothing about it works. There are a lot of good people, yes, but the system is broken. The things I’ve seen here, let me tell you…“ His voice started to trail off. Then he laughed. “What can I say? It’s a circus.”
To hear him tell it, his political career was not a joke but a personal quest rooted in a tragic night 21 years ago, when he still worked for a travelling circus in Brazil’s violent, impoverished northeast. That night, during a performance, Tiririca’s pet monkey freaked out and bit a rich man’s daughter. Tiririca knew the incident wouldn’t go unanswered. “Where I come from,” he says, “the powerful make their own laws, and they hand out their own sentences.” Sure enough, a few hours later, a truck pulled up carrying five or six men with torches. They burned the circus to the ground, and Tiririca lost every penny he had.
The next morning, he, his wife and their 2-year-old son hitched a ride in the back of a truck to the nearest city. “I cried a lot,” he says, “and I made myself a few promises—which I kept.”
The first promise: Never live hand-to-mouth again. So Tiririca expanded his repertoire, and recorded an album of humorous, somewhat edgy songs about the gritty world he grew up in, taking on difficult topics such as prison, fast women and street kids. The album was a nationwide phenomenon, selling more than 1.5 million copies. Tiririca became rich and famous. That, in turn, helped with the second promise: “To try to do right in the world, so others wouldn’t suffer like I did.”
As his career grew to include TV shows and other lucrative projects, the clown handed out money to his friends and also quietly donated a considerable amount to charity. When his mother suggested he run for Congress, it seemed like a logical next step. “I thought: ‘Man, I’ll get there, and I’ll be able to help so many people, it’ll be awesome.’”
The reality has, of course, been less than awesome. “Nothing gets done, and a lot of people are just here to steal,” he complains. But wait—how could this have been news for a man who got elected by lampooning Congress as a den of thieves and fools? Tiririca frowns. “I campaigned as a clown because that is my profession,” he says. Just as a doctor might have run on the strength of his medical career, he explains, his natural role was to crack jokes. “But then, once you get here—look, politics is serious, Okay? This is serious. This is about hospitals and schools, and representing the people who voted for you. Damn, man! This is no joke!”
To that end, Tiririca has donned a blazer and tie, and remained resolutely wig-free while Congress is in session. Respected veteran congressional aides staff his office. Even more shocking, especially to his critics, Tiririca is one of just nine deputies—out of 513 total—who has not missed a single vote. “It’s the least you can do, man, is show up,” he says, shaking his head. “Why these other guys can’t do that, I don’t understand.”
