The Portuguese parliament that took office this week has only 76 female deputies (33.04% of the total). Let’s draw parallels. Portugal has one of the worst performances among Portuguese-speaking countries (behind Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, Timor-Leste), among southern European countries (where the average is 36.7%) and has fewer female deputies than than autocratic countries like Belarus, the United Arab Emirates or Nicaragua. There are 55 countries with better levels of female representation in their respective houses of democracy.
In a context in which the Portuguese parliament has been affected by an acute intoxication of partisan tactics and in which those who care about the dignity of institutions or the real interests of the collective are alone, the representation of women counts for little. But it is exactly at these moments that we must highlight that the female representation index in the new Portuguese parliament is the worst in the last 10 years, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, based in Geneva.
In 2019, the 2006 Parity Law underwent a second amendment (by Organic Law No. 1/2019, of March 29), which increased the minimum representation required for each sex in the lists of candidates for the 33rd Assembly of the Republic. .3% to 40%. But these guidelines did not translate into female parliamentary presence in the expected range.
In their defense, most parties systematically present two arguments. They claim that it is the voters who choose the deputies, forgetting that we do not have district votes and voters vote on ordered lists of candidates, not on specific candidates within a given electoral district (as in Brazil or Mexico).
Then they say that it is difficult to find women on party political radars available to serve the republic. Naturally, the problem is more complex. Women still face many obstacles to entering politics, such as the lack of family and social encouragement, machismo and misogyny, professional devaluation and the difficulty of reconciling personal and professional lives. Women are still victims of gender stereotypes that associate them with the private sphere and taking care of the home, while politics is seen as a testosteronic space. These obstacles have already been the subject of much academic work. Parties should resist inertia and accommodation.
Over the weekend, it was ridiculous to watch Marques Mendes on television, exercising his talents, recommending that the new government of Montenegro have women “because it is important”. It sounded like a political comment made in the 70s. But maybe he’s right and we still need to state the obvious. Basically, that’s what I’m also doing in this article. Livre, one of the few parties that has a substantive feminist agenda, elected only one woman out of four deputies, which represents 25%, below the PSD (24 women or 30.8% of the parliamentary group) and even Chega himself (13 women and 26%).
It should be trivial to be a feminist – to believe in equal rights between men and women. Having more women in parliament is beneficial for society as a whole. For example, it plays an important role in combating corruption and channeling resources to ensure the quality and consistency of public service provision. Studies also show that having more women in parliament contributes to the diversification of the legislative agenda and the presentation of new perspectives and experiences for the legislative process. Furthermore, the presence of more women in parliament can inspire other women to get involved in politics and strengthen democracy.
It should be noted that Portugal is one of the few countries in the world with a maximum score in the World Bank’s Women, Business, and the Law (WBL) Index, which measures the legal protection of women. We are very good at making laws, but less good at ensuring their actual application and dissemination.
Sophia de Mello Breyner, the first woman president of a parliamentary committee (in 1975) stated in the Assembly of the Republic that the country was “transformed into a supermarket of slogans”, that “politics of the capital have been carried out; and not the politics of Portugal” and that “despite the evident and fair growing discontent of the Portuguese people, the revolution has constantly been led by the literate maximalism of the false intellectuals of Lisbon, by the faction.”
There is a lack of women who can speak like that in Parliament.
