Post-dictatorship Career and Political Resilience
Since then, Maluf only managed to get himself elected to the Executive once, in 1992, again as mayor of São Paulo, despite his participation in nearly every gubernatorial and mayoral election for São Paulo state and São Paulo city, with the exception of 1989 when he was a presidential candidate in the first direct presidential elections since 1960 – in what was a disastrous campaign, remembered in Brazilian political lore only because of Maluf's "antic", said at a speech made to Medical Faculty students in Belo Horizonte: declaring himself favourable to capital punishment in cases of rape followed by murder, he said jokingly that "if one has sexual urges, that's okay; rape, but do not kill!" (estupra mas não mata). Nevertheless, Maluf remained a regional political force in São Paulo, the election of Celso Pitta as São Paulo city mayor being directly attributed to his endorsement. When he ended his last mayoral term in 1996, he was considered the best mayor São Paulo had ever had up until then, receiving a 80% approval rate. In 2011, a survey by the Datafolha research firm, after asking, again, a sample of São Paulo locals about who would be the best mayor the city had ever had, obtained the result that Maluf stood first with 47% of the sample's preferences.
Such high rates of local approval stand as a reflection of the fact that Maluf was able to forge himself a successful career in post-dictatorship Brazil, despite his perennial reputation for shady deals and for an unsavory personality pointing directly to his former connections to the authoritarian régime. This has led various scholars to try to explain his political resilience. To some, this resilience is of an ideological nature: having his career nurtured in a right-wing military dictatorship, Maluf came to stand for a kind of reactionary activism, specially strong among small businesspeople and the self-employed, whose hallmark consisted "in the refusal to admit the social character of social problems", proposing instead a heavy-handed approach to them. In the words of the philosopher Marilena Chaui, writing in the mid-1980s, malufismo stood for the privatization of political power: "a fringe form of the dictatorship as it turned from raw force into mob rule".
Read more about this topic: Paulo Maluf
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