I was seeing the reports from the first pass which said it was almost guaranteed that Lula would not win because of what the results of the first were. I wonder what caused that prediction to fail.
I am glad the son of a failed coup organizer and a trump puppet didn't get elected and am hopeful for Brazils ability to self govern. Breaking free of US financial monopolies (credit cards) gives me hope they'll continue to produce and innovative into a healthier and competitive world market, but I am also tired of Lula being at the helm and wish someone else could step up and take the reigns. When someone stays in power for so long in a democracy it makes me suspicious of the legitimacy of their power. Are they popular because they are good for the country or are they popular because they have the right people with power, influence, and money on their side.
Hell of an allegation to make with no evidence provided. How do "they" "have" the supreme court, and why does that mean that they're popular and win elections?
Really? Didn't the Bolsanaro campaign also request an extension of the voting deadline due to water logging and transportation problems in parts of the country?
A lot of media outlets have been fingering the outage of some data centers due to kinetic action for a worldwide decline in divisive rhetoric, potentially impacting democratic processes.
"son of a failed coup organizer" is an absolute false statement which only serves those in power to criminalize dissent and have been seen in many authoritarian regimes during their implementation.
> "son of a failed coup organizer" is an absolute false statement
But, his dad:
> Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is serving a 27-year prison sentence after being convicted by Brazil's Supreme Court for plotting a coup following his 2022 election defeat
I don’t see how to read it any other way. Explain?
> "son of a failed coup organizer" is an absolute false statement
How so?
I don't really follow Brazilian politics, but Jair Bolsonaro was found guilty by the Brazilian Supreme Court of:
participation in an armed criminal organization, attempted violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, attempted coup d'état, qualified damage, and deterioration of protected heritage property.[1]
Flávio Bolsonaro is Jair Bolsonaro's son. "attempted coup d'état" is a failed coup.
There don't seem to be any serious questions that the process was fair and that the Supreme Court was impartial (I mean there are always Trumpian accusations of bias, but I mean ones with any evidence at all).
The only part I could see possible disagreement with is organizer I suppose? But I must be missing something.
Flavio promised to pardon his father, so the other effect of this is that Bolsonaro stays in jail. Although by jail I mean house arrest, which is something that rich, powerful people manage to get somehow and is barely a punishment.
It was anyway a lose-lose situation. I hope to see Brazil free from 'bolsopetismo'/'bolsolulismo' (as some of we call this disease to keep Bolsonaro and Lula or their parties on the presidential room) soon, but here we go for another 4 years...
On the same day, in Serbia, the long-term incumbent was defeated by a party/movement that has been founded only 2 years ago as a response to corruption issues. So change can happen.
I agree with you. I wish we had better candidates. The right had Dr. Enéas Carneiro, who's dead. The left has PCO, which is awesome but is shunned by the rest of the left because they are bold enough to criticize Lula and PT. Neither ever had or will have any realistic chance of ever winning.
It's not going to end until Lula literally drops dead. This country proved that today.
The idea that you must fire your most competent employees after ~8 years on the job, in a exceedingly difficult job that requires on-the-job training, is in fact one of the most inane and damaging things to democracy.
They are most competent in getting elected, which often is not the same as being most competent in anything else.
Even with Germany it turned out that Angela Merkel did grave mistakes and Germans were able to find out about those only after she left office. Being continually in office gives you the ability to hide your trials. The longer you stay the easier it is for you to get elected.
That’s why it is very important to have a time limit in power.
Disagree. Presidency, like other elected positions, should not be a career. I want people who can serve with high dedication and then go back to private life. I'd like to see term limits on representatives and senators as well, and also an upper age limit.
It’s a nice argument but there’s another axis: fatigue. Leading takes its toll. To be charitable it’s not plausible that you can run a country, with all the stress that entails, and out compete everyone not at the apex of the front line.
I check my brake pads every year. Eventually the incumbent pads lose out to some whipper-snapper from the new pads box. I might vote red again or I might switch to blue. It depends how muddy it is. Either way, it’s both a new/old choice as well as a red/blue choice.
Time-in-office is also a major contributor to corruption. Lukashenko has been winning the same election for 30+ years!
i feel like democracy isn't about the most competent but about the "least bad" option you could have. an effective dictator (lol) can cut thru the red tape but what people are worried about are the terrible ones. at least with a democracy you can rotate them out.
Why? If they’re democratically voted, what’s wrong with it?
Australia has no term limits and has famously had the longest serving prime minister (12 years) followed by extremely short terms. All seemed to represent the general will of the population.
I wish Australia had term limits for all politicians, and not just for the PM. Term limits prevents people becoming career politicians, which i think would be a good thing.
Mark Rutte, Netherlands, 14 years prime minister, four terms in office. It is hard to say if he represented the general will of the population given that his party, the liberal-right VVD favors the more well-to-do part of the population. I think many voters voted for him as a trustworthy face and friendly, amicable man. Vote for the personality. He was also characterized as Mr Tefal for his ability to make nothing stick to him in terms of criticism, and utterly pragmatic, denouncing vision. As a result the big problems and areas where reform were most needed, were always pushed to the future.
You might say he introduced a kind of populism, where politicians only care about the next election round and their reputation, to the cost of important decision-making and long-term thinking. Unfortunately this is kind of a working strategy, a weakness of democracy, where the current centre-right government is struggling with all the aggravated problems not dealt with in the past, and the voters think "well, perhaps we have to vote VVD again where these problems didn't exist", or vote more right-wing by populism that makes immigration the cause of all problems.
It's very situationally dependent. Term limits stop bad politicians doing too much damage, they also stop good politicians getting too much momentum on their side.
No electoral method is perfect and there are problems with Instant runoff ranked ballots. Look up "Favourite Betrayal" as a problem where ranking your most favourite incorrectly can accidentally result in your least favourite winning.
Of course just because there are technically flaws, doesn't mean it's not an improvement over the status quo.
Instant Runoff Ranked ballots are particularly well suited for electing a single position like a Mayor or President. Given that it's still a majoritarian system like First Pass the Post, it's a much more questionable system to use for other things like electing a parliament.
Depends on which ranked system. IRV has a lot of issues that other systems (like STAR, my personal preference in voting system, or Condorcet methods for instance) address much better. Non-monotonicity in particular seems like a bad property of a voting system, so I'm confused that IRV is so popular recently.
I have a learning a bit more related to tech from this election. Centrally organized, cohesive, persistent online engagement wins elections.
It won for Bolsonaro whose campaign nailed it in 2018. It didn’t win in 2022 because he was completely bad in dealing with pandemics (mocking people dying and saying he had nothing to do with it being president).
Now, Lula’s campaign was absolutely dead during the whole time. Until it lost in the legislative by a mile and in the President run had a partial loss in the first round. Then the campaign lit up after the partial upset.
Janones, an energetic young guy elected to legislative with good online presence led the campaign. He achieved creating a WhatsApp group with 11 million people called “Lula’s army”. He would give the directions and the people would obey almost blindly.
The interwebs (basically WhatsApp + Instagram) got flooded with this top to bottom Lula’s campaign.
The first round results made Bolsonaro very favorite. Lula victory was a huge upset. I put the merit in this incessant social media campaign.
The thing is: “centrally planned cohesive campaign” looks a lot like a cult. The point of the campaign is not critical thought or argumentation, it is incessant messaging. Think fandoms.
Bolsonaro voters pejorative nickname from past campaigns was they were all “cattle”. Because that is how they behaved online. Ironically, what worked for Lula voters this year was they behaving like “cattle”. Just reposting and following this central orders on what to post, what to say, what to dress.
The thing is, it works. Cult-like fandoms work in elections. The right won a few elections like this in the world. In Brazil, the left just learned how to do it was well.
The more mindless posters a politician has following their campaign HQ orders, the more votes they have.
In India, we have a name for for blind supporters of the current Hindu right ruling party.. The BJP... They're called andh bhakts... Translated 'the faithful blind'... Even incontrovertible proof of wrong doing does not change their mindset
> Even incontrovertible proof of wrong doing does not change their mindset
You could argue that about pretty much every politician and their supporters in India. The right wing keeps winning because the left refuses to address the fears of a majority of the Indian population. Even if those fears are unwarranted - dismissing them as "uneducated" and "blind sheep" alienates people even more.
Janones was not leading a cult, this is just absurd. He was not telling people what to believe or how to behave AT ALL - he was just giving directions on what to do on social media to win the elections. Bolsonarism on the other hand is 100% a cult, from the beginning.
> It didn’t win in 2022 because he was completely bad in dealing with pandemics
And also because the entire state apparatus was engaged in unconstitutional censorship of his "centrally organized, cohesive, persistent online engagement" machine, which is what wins elections, as you noted.
And now that Janones set up his own "Lula's Army", Brazilian institutions did not manifest even a fraction of the energy they had shown while persecuting Bolsonaro.
Lula was allowed to do everything Bolsonaro was persecuted for in 2022. He even lowered taxes on fuels, and got away with it. The tax cut ends tomorrow.
AFAIK the final numbers are not out yet, the electoral commission called it because Lula's margin is sufficiently large that Bolsonaro mathematically cannot win.
An area of Amazon forest roughly the size of the US state of New Jersey has remained standing due to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s leadership of Brazil, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
Once again, a clear anti-Bolsonaro vote from the majority of the electorate. Lula won because he got last-minute support from the moderates and even some right-wingers. It certainly does not feel like a victory of the left.
Now he will face a much bigger opposition in Congress and therefore will have to find a middle ground.
I expect his policies to move even further to the right. This might pave the way for his vice-president Alckmin, a historical right-winger, to run in the 2030 elections — likely against São Paulo’s governor Tarcísio de Freitas, also a right-winger and considered more moderate than the Bolsonaros despite being associated with them.
I wouldn’t say deadlocked but the coalition between moderates and the left isn’t a given. There are many centrist parties who will likely alternate between supporting and opposing the government depending on the issue.
i don't know why you were downvoted. any turn to the moderation/center seems good news to me. those crazy swings between extremes left or right are just bad. i have never voted for both bolsonaro neither lula and crave for something closer to the center.
lula is a little less crazy (compared to bolsonaro), likely not anti-science, preserves the amazon, seems to care about keeping the same constituition and so on, but he heaves his hand when it comes to (mostly populist) spending, like there's no tomorrow.
he thinks he is helping the poor, but it is just for short term. so much public debt, in a few years everyone, rich or poor, will have pay the price, with interest. people that likes him usually say they don't like milei, but his incredible debt build up is actually a future-milei magnet.
also, after so much terms and "custo brazil" ("Brazilian (Business) Cost Burden"?) still prohibitive, the country never goes up from its terrible positions in making business rankings. one can just not hope he does anything better now after so much terms. his spending is too demand biased.
> he heaves his hand when it comes to (mostly populist) spending, like there's no tomorrow
This is key to his reelection. He literally ran on a "Bolsonaro will end Bolsa Família" campaign.
It's unfortunate. Lula inherited a post-Washington consensus neoliberal Brazil. He had nearly 20 years to undo all that and reindustrialize the country, thereby putting us on China's path.
I would have voted for him regardless of ideology if he had done it, but he didn't. It's just easier to just anesthetize the population and put them on paliative care with free money.
> he thinks he is helping the poor, but it is just for short term.
This "short term" is unbearably long... But I do see signs that the system is reaching its limits. Government was already having trouble paying pensions before Vorcaro.
> so much public debt, in a few years everyone, rich or poor, will have pay the price, with interest.
I would call this a defensive victory. The left’s best chance was a 0-0 draw, so they put everyone in defense and managed to prevent the right from scoring a victory goal.
moving to the right would be a trap. (cf. Dem party vs Trump) The left must instead build an anti-right wing narrative. People vote on material benefits so delivering more of those should be top priority—I think Trumps slump in the US proves that.
Nobody wants to see them cut taxes from the rich or reduce employers rights. The popular "right" in Brazil wants taxes to be easier to pay, judges not to decide based on who is asking, and clear rules on what you can or can't do.
Also, nobody can beat Dilma on cutting taxes from the rich.
Lol, you this dumb? Lula is insanely corrupt as well. Can you define fascism or is it just what your feed is telling you to say now days just like everyone libs disagreed with before was a pdf file until it lost its meaning. Then we were racists until that lost its meaning.. now onto fascism. Until that also loses its meaning.
O no downvotes waaaaa the libs are picking on me i am going to cryyyyyy
I am not from Brazil, nor am I closely following its politics, but I would like to pose a genuine question: in a modern liberal democracy, doesn’t a four-term presidency represent too much power concentrated in one person?
The one good thing about the current system is that shitheads like musk can spend half-a-billion to buy elections, but the people still have the final say.
Interestingly the current "lets stop corporations from spending money on elections" that's popular in several states - wouldn't directly touch Musk because he can just spend the money directly.
I don't think "Oooh. Scary muslims!" works any less well if it's required to say "Elon Musk" rather than "American Apple Pie Goodness PAC" or whatever.
It might make a difference for smaller donors, especially if they're more sensitive about their personal PR.
I don't know the specifics of Brazil's system, but at least in the US gerrymandering has nothing to do with the Presidency or Senate, only the House. It's also not without risk. Gerrymandering is bad, but it doesn't change the totals of votes; it attempts to reapportion "excess" votes yielding a large win margin in one area to give winning, but necessarily smaller, margins in more areas. Amongst other challenges though that smaller margin means if there is a wave then a gerrymander can turn into a "dummymander" where previously safe districts get flipped.
>funny business
This is actually pretty dang hard in anything but a total sham, and even then is at least obvious it happened. Some timy fiddling at the margins may be possible to sneak through, and yeah some elections that might make the difference. But that can't counter any serious victory. The more common technique seems to be trying to suppress the vote. But as well as also not being trivial it also too risks backfiring by motivating people much harder. There is a lot of human psychology around "loss", people often absolutely hate things being taken from them even if they were complacent about having them.
Gerrymandering doesn’t change the fact that the voters decide the results. Most electoral systems already give unequal weight to different votes based on district sizes etc., so gerrymandering is only a change of degree and intention, not of how democracy fundamentally works.
No, this much money in politics is still very dangerous.
A major reason it isn't working for now is because Donald Trump is, in addition to being a corrupt autocrat, incredibly incompetent. We shouldn't have to rely on that next time.
In this thread.. people whose context on the election ranges from “i saw it on my feed a week ago and have a really valid opinion” to “that one guy is a total fascist”. HN you are full on retarded
Just a friendly gesture that there's still independents/non-partisan's here. We're a dying breed, but it seems to the the inevitable outcome when politics becomes a religion.
Buddy, ICE is chasing down and killing US citizens. Musk is openly supporting European neo-Nazis. The US tech sector is supporting the genocide of Palestinians, and interfering with foreign elections.
Polymarket was like 80% Bolsonaro Jr to 20% Lula 7pm, 7:15 it changed to 60% Lula. There were multiple reports in the news websites about it favoring Bolsonaro which itself probably made some people vote for him.
I'm quite happy with the result tho. Let's see how the far right opposition will take this loss. I'm already expecting the worse.
20% happens about 1 in 5 times. I know that's snarky wording but 20% shots come though constantly in daily life.
I think as humans we are really bad at intuition about probabilities, and it being an election only makes it much worse. I don't think anyone is consciously conflating these with poll numbers but percentages of voters are the numbers we see a lot more than prediction markets, and 80% is idunno an 80% chance of getting between 50% and 54% of the vote or something.
If he has an 80% chance to win that means Polymarket will be "wrong" 20% of the time. And 80% seems fair given he was leading in the polls by a razor thin but consistent margin.
They are good at some markets but they don’t understand latam and especially Brazilian politics in the least so whatever makes it into the US news drives the market although it is normally wrong
A 20% chance of Lula winning is still a real chance of winning. A standard rule of thumb would require 2 standard deviations aka 5% aka p<0.05 for relative certainty.
If the new right wing senate manages to at least impeach some supreme court judges, I'll still call it a major win.
Surprising to see Bolsonaro lose at this point, but the real upset of this election was caused by the senate. The whole point of electing the right wing was to impeach the judges. So long as that happens, I will be satisfied.
The next four years were going to seriously suck for Flávio. Now the economic bomb is going to explode in Lula's hands. I was tempted to vote for Lula myself just to make that happen. It's the supreme court issue that stopped me.
Lula's barely fit for his position as president too. He might resign and let the vice-president deal with it. Also an acceptable outcome.
Lula used a justice he appointed to order polling stations to stay open past the agreed upon deadline without consulting the courts that are supposed to rule on election matters. That's election interference. I'm not convinced the population is going to see him as legitimate after that stunt.
Brazilian here. It was unprecedented but not unreasonable, given problems with availability of public transportation in a number of locations. Both sides asked for extensions, although in different places that would favour their own bases. A nationwide extension was the best option, even if it was semi-botched due to the time it was decided. Also, the vote difference between Lula and Bolsonaro was much larger than any additional voting would have delivered.
Bolsonaro also sought extra voting time as well. He wanted it done only in certain states but it was granted nationwide. He was very involved in this process and is now crying foul because it wasn't done in a matter exclusively favorable to him!
It’s a tough position to fight for: “Lula only won because too many people voted for him!”.
I think you are equivocating. Denying people their vote indeed counts as election tampering but that doesn’t mean giving more people the vote is also bad.
What I wrote happened. It's not "fake news". What remains to be seen is which polling stations remained open and which did not. This election may need to be annulled.
Deeply unfortunate, but not entirely unexpected. Lula was allowed to do every "electoral crime" they barred Bolsonaro from doing in 2022. They even extended voting time, a move that directly benefiting him, and also ruled illegal back in 2022.
Gotta look on the bright side. Bolsonaro was closer to US interests than I'd like. If the elected right wing senate manages to at least impeach some supreme court justices next year, I'm going to be OK with this.
Many cities had their mayor cancelling free public transportation and stopping people from going voting. Extending the time is a reaction, not a first action. Furthermore, the ask didn't come just from Lula's party, it came from both candidates [1].
2022 Brazil had the Federal Police Director actively interfering with transportation as well.
Both sides asked to extend the hours. The court took the action. I don't really know brazillian politics and what happened in the past but thought I'd point that out.
Abstainees were thought to be the biggest source of new votes for Lula in the 2nd round of elections. I think such a move benefited Lula far more than it did Flávio.
It's also inconsistent with the court's own precedent. Extending voting hours was deemed illegal back in 2022. "Everybody had the chance to vote", said Alexandre de Moraes.
After Lula lost in the 1st round, suddenly it became legal again. The irony is not lost on me. That's the pattern with the leftist judges in the courts. The supreme court judge who decided it used to be Lula's own lawyer.
Back in 2022, Lula's party used to be against Bolsonaro's "digital militias". They engaged everybody they had in the superior and supreme courts in order to censor it all. It was disgusting.
This time around, some guy in Lula's party created "Lula's Army", a channel with millions of people in it. Suddenly, it was fine.
They used to cry about "fake news" and call for censorship at every opportunity, and they'd get it because they own the courts. Now they were the ones spreading "fake news" of all sorts. Did they get censored? Nah.
Censorship in Brazil is unconstitutional, by the way. Political censorship is doubly so. It doesn't matter, because they own the supreme court.
There are no laws in Brazil, there is only what the supreme court wants. Whatever they write on a piece of paper becomes law, and police obeys it. They are the true seat of power in this country.
This is a very confusing comment. Most on this side don't know the insider informing the Brazilian elections, and we only know the public news
Can you explain?
You are right winger but don't like the Brazilian right wing aligning with the US right wing, but do like the politicians who are aligned with the US right wing?
I'm kinda trying to move past left/right labels. I'll try to explain.
Bolsonaro generally supports privatizing Brazilian state companies and selling them off to foreigners. I don't want that. Especially not to the US and Israel.
Lula on the other hand is better aligned with China, which is also what I want.
Lula and myself are aligned on these two points. So this outcome is not entirely bad for me.
The problem I have with Lula is his party's obnoxious taxation, lack of a real plan for reindustrialization, continuous defense of criminals, and most importantly, his total domination of the supreme court. I voted for the right specifically to see those judges impeached and imprisoned, because I absolutely oppose everything they did in 2022, far more than I ever opposed Lula himself. I'm of the opinion that presidents and elections barely matter anymore, because it's the supreme court that runs the country. It's the Venezuela governance model: president appoints god-like supreme court judges and rules monocratically through them.
The 1st round this month was such an upset not because of Bolsonaro but because of the senate. They are the ones who can impeach supreme court judges, and when Brazil unexpectedly elected a right wing majority in the senate, it struck true fear into the court. This was our chance to completely wipe out that court and forever change the history of this country, like Bukele did for El Salvador.
While in the end the necessary victory didn't materialize, Brazilian senate is still absolute majority right wing now, and they could still impeach those judges. I'm not going to hold out hope for that anymore, but if I see at least one judge bite the dust I'll still call it a major win.
Bolsonaro-aligned mayors deliberately blocked busses from running that would take people to the polls in Lula-supporting neighborhoods. Emergency legal decisions allowed voting times to extend as a response to this. By the margin of votes, it wouldn't have mattered.
> Lula was allowed to do every "electoral crime" they barred Bolsonaro from doing in 2022. They even extended voting time, a move that directly benefiting him, and also ruled illegal back in 2022.
Yeah, I agree completely. I didn't vote for any of these candidates, I voted to impeach the supreme court.
There is exactly one politician that once upon a time represented me: Dr. Enéas Carneiro. Ironically, his ideas were closest to the Chinese Communist Party. He's dead now.
The left wing has PCO, a real left wing party, and I agree with them on a daily basis. They're shunned by everyone, and were even persecuted by the supreme court along with the right wing.
I'm increasingly resigned to the idea that immigration is the only option by now.
It was extremely amusing. Brazilian election law generally sets 5 p.m. Brasília time as the deadline for closing polls. The judge who made the emergency ruling to pause counting and extend voting hours by 2 hours was Cristiano Zanin Martins - Lula's former personal attorney. The same guy who Lula nominated to the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil in June 2023.
Yeah it’s alarming how much HN users are willing to support corruption so long as it’s their preferred candidate doing it. Really is all just tribalism to most posters in this thread so far
I was seeing the reports from the first pass which said it was almost guaranteed that Lula would not win because of what the results of the first were. I wonder what caused that prediction to fail.
I am glad the son of a failed coup organizer and a trump puppet didn't get elected and am hopeful for Brazils ability to self govern. Breaking free of US financial monopolies (credit cards) gives me hope they'll continue to produce and innovative into a healthier and competitive world market, but I am also tired of Lula being at the helm and wish someone else could step up and take the reigns. When someone stays in power for so long in a democracy it makes me suspicious of the legitimacy of their power. Are they popular because they are good for the country or are they popular because they have the right people with power, influence, and money on their side.
> are they popular because they have the right people with power, influence, and money on their side
They have the supreme court. That is all they really need.
Hell of an allegation to make with no evidence provided. How do "they" "have" the supreme court, and why does that mean that they're popular and win elections?
2 replies →
And of course, like always you will present no proof other than 'everyone knows'
Really? Didn't the Bolsanaro campaign also request an extension of the voting deadline due to water logging and transportation problems in parts of the country?
> I wonder what caused that prediction to fail.
A lot of media outlets have been fingering the outage of some data centers due to kinetic action for a worldwide decline in divisive rhetoric, potentially impacting democratic processes.
If that were true it would have diminished Lula "support" as Lula is strongly preferred by Russia due to his anti-US and anti-NATO stance.
1 reply →
This has been widely discredited.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9y7l0pm8jkko
[delayed]
"son of a failed coup organizer" is an absolute false statement which only serves those in power to criminalize dissent and have been seen in many authoritarian regimes during their implementation.
> "son of a failed coup organizer" is an absolute false statement
But, his dad:
> Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is serving a 27-year prison sentence after being convicted by Brazil's Supreme Court for plotting a coup following his 2022 election defeat
I don’t see how to read it any other way. Explain?
> "son of a failed coup organizer" is an absolute false statement
How so?
I don't really follow Brazilian politics, but Jair Bolsonaro was found guilty by the Brazilian Supreme Court of:
participation in an armed criminal organization, attempted violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, attempted coup d'état, qualified damage, and deterioration of protected heritage property.[1]
Flávio Bolsonaro is Jair Bolsonaro's son. "attempted coup d'état" is a failed coup.
There don't seem to be any serious questions that the process was fair and that the Supreme Court was impartial (I mean there are always Trumpian accusations of bias, but I mean ones with any evidence at all).
The only part I could see possible disagreement with is organizer I suppose? But I must be missing something.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_for_the_2022%E2%80%93202...
2 replies →
> "son of a failed coup organizer" is an absolute false statement
Jair Bolsonaro was tried and convicted of organizing a coup.
Flavio Bolsonaro is his son.
Where's the false part?
Bolsonaro attempted a coup pretty plainly. I think you are describing a conspiracy theory that Bolsonaro is innocent?
Pretty far fetched.
so are you saying he is not his son?
[flagged]
1 reply →
Flavio promised to pardon his father, so the other effect of this is that Bolsonaro stays in jail. Although by jail I mean house arrest, which is something that rich, powerful people manage to get somehow and is barely a punishment.
This was the first time I saw a major mainstream media outlet prominently feature a statistical predictive model live during the vote count (and it was spot on): https://www.estadao.com.br/politica/eleicoes/em-tempo-real-p...
Indeed, Rodrigo Mahlmeister's model was absolutey impressive. It even predicted the inflection points incredibly well.
It was anyway a lose-lose situation. I hope to see Brazil free from 'bolsopetismo'/'bolsolulismo' (as some of we call this disease to keep Bolsonaro and Lula or their parties on the presidential room) soon, but here we go for another 4 years...
On the same day, in Serbia, the long-term incumbent was defeated by a party/movement that has been founded only 2 years ago as a response to corruption issues. So change can happen.
I agree with you. I wish we had better candidates. The right had Dr. Enéas Carneiro, who's dead. The left has PCO, which is awesome but is shunned by the rest of the left because they are bold enough to criticize Lula and PT. Neither ever had or will have any realistic chance of ever winning.
It's not going to end until Lula literally drops dead. This country proved that today.
As optimistic as I want to be, this is the fourth term for a president?? That cannot be good for democracy.
It can be better than the alternatives and still not good.
The idea that you must fire your most competent employees after ~8 years on the job, in a exceedingly difficult job that requires on-the-job training, is in fact one of the most inane and damaging things to democracy.
They are most competent in getting elected, which often is not the same as being most competent in anything else.
Even with Germany it turned out that Angela Merkel did grave mistakes and Germans were able to find out about those only after she left office. Being continually in office gives you the ability to hide your trials. The longer you stay the easier it is for you to get elected.
That’s why it is very important to have a time limit in power.
4 replies →
Disagree. Presidency, like other elected positions, should not be a career. I want people who can serve with high dedication and then go back to private life. I'd like to see term limits on representatives and senators as well, and also an upper age limit.
7 replies →
It’s a nice argument but there’s another axis: fatigue. Leading takes its toll. To be charitable it’s not plausible that you can run a country, with all the stress that entails, and out compete everyone not at the apex of the front line.
I check my brake pads every year. Eventually the incumbent pads lose out to some whipper-snapper from the new pads box. I might vote red again or I might switch to blue. It depends how muddy it is. Either way, it’s both a new/old choice as well as a red/blue choice.
Time-in-office is also a major contributor to corruption. Lukashenko has been winning the same election for 30+ years!
i feel like democracy isn't about the most competent but about the "least bad" option you could have. an effective dictator (lol) can cut thru the red tape but what people are worried about are the terrible ones. at least with a democracy you can rotate them out.
Why? If they’re democratically voted, what’s wrong with it?
Australia has no term limits and has famously had the longest serving prime minister (12 years) followed by extremely short terms. All seemed to represent the general will of the population.
I wish Australia had term limits for all politicians, and not just for the PM. Term limits prevents people becoming career politicians, which i think would be a good thing.
2 replies →
Mark Rutte, Netherlands, 14 years prime minister, four terms in office. It is hard to say if he represented the general will of the population given that his party, the liberal-right VVD favors the more well-to-do part of the population. I think many voters voted for him as a trustworthy face and friendly, amicable man. Vote for the personality. He was also characterized as Mr Tefal for his ability to make nothing stick to him in terms of criticism, and utterly pragmatic, denouncing vision. As a result the big problems and areas where reform were most needed, were always pushed to the future.
You might say he introduced a kind of populism, where politicians only care about the next election round and their reputation, to the cost of important decision-making and long-term thinking. Unfortunately this is kind of a working strategy, a weakness of democracy, where the current centre-right government is struggling with all the aggravated problems not dealt with in the past, and the voters think "well, perhaps we have to vote VVD again where these problems didn't exist", or vote more right-wing by populism that makes immigration the cause of all problems.
His first two terms were 2003-2011
Not in a row.
Lula served two terms from 2002-2010, and came back in 2022 (now to serve until 2030, if he lives until then).
Plus he's 80 today and will be 84 by the time his term ends. Gerontocracy for the win.
It's very situationally dependent. Term limits stop bad politicians doing too much damage, they also stop good politicians getting too much momentum on their side.
Term limits result in dynasties "behind the scenes" running things.
Long-term politicians result in "behind the scenes" doing the real work of running things.
Wait a minute ...
There's a limit of two consecutive terms.
Roosevelt has entered chat.
we dont have a lot of hoices in south america and he is top notch
It’s good for Putin. He and Lula are allies, and their friendship goes way back.
Let's do takes for the sake of takes.
This is probably a good support case for run-off elections being beneficial.
Ranked voting and runoff systems seem to have nothing but positives yet adoption is still lacking for some reason.
No electoral method is perfect and there are problems with Instant runoff ranked ballots. Look up "Favourite Betrayal" as a problem where ranking your most favourite incorrectly can accidentally result in your least favourite winning.
Of course just because there are technically flaws, doesn't mean it's not an improvement over the status quo.
Instant Runoff Ranked ballots are particularly well suited for electing a single position like a Mayor or President. Given that it's still a majoritarian system like First Pass the Post, it's a much more questionable system to use for other things like electing a parliament.
3 replies →
Depends on which ranked system. IRV has a lot of issues that other systems (like STAR, my personal preference in voting system, or Condorcet methods for instance) address much better. Non-monotonicity in particular seems like a bad property of a voting system, so I'm confused that IRV is so popular recently.
2 replies →
First past the post is beneficial for establishment parties.
1 reply →
Nice to see this despite the tech fascist effort.
I have a learning a bit more related to tech from this election. Centrally organized, cohesive, persistent online engagement wins elections.
It won for Bolsonaro whose campaign nailed it in 2018. It didn’t win in 2022 because he was completely bad in dealing with pandemics (mocking people dying and saying he had nothing to do with it being president).
Now, Lula’s campaign was absolutely dead during the whole time. Until it lost in the legislative by a mile and in the President run had a partial loss in the first round. Then the campaign lit up after the partial upset.
Janones, an energetic young guy elected to legislative with good online presence led the campaign. He achieved creating a WhatsApp group with 11 million people called “Lula’s army”. He would give the directions and the people would obey almost blindly.
The interwebs (basically WhatsApp + Instagram) got flooded with this top to bottom Lula’s campaign.
The first round results made Bolsonaro very favorite. Lula victory was a huge upset. I put the merit in this incessant social media campaign.
The thing is: “centrally planned cohesive campaign” looks a lot like a cult. The point of the campaign is not critical thought or argumentation, it is incessant messaging. Think fandoms.
Bolsonaro voters pejorative nickname from past campaigns was they were all “cattle”. Because that is how they behaved online. Ironically, what worked for Lula voters this year was they behaving like “cattle”. Just reposting and following this central orders on what to post, what to say, what to dress.
The thing is, it works. Cult-like fandoms work in elections. The right won a few elections like this in the world. In Brazil, the left just learned how to do it was well.
The more mindless posters a politician has following their campaign HQ orders, the more votes they have.
In India, we have a name for for blind supporters of the current Hindu right ruling party.. The BJP... They're called andh bhakts... Translated 'the faithful blind'... Even incontrovertible proof of wrong doing does not change their mindset
Lula's been involved in over a dozen corruption scandals by now. It doesn't matter to anyone. It's been completely normalized.
9 replies →
> Even incontrovertible proof of wrong doing does not change their mindset
You could argue that about pretty much every politician and their supporters in India. The right wing keeps winning because the left refuses to address the fears of a majority of the Indian population. Even if those fears are unwarranted - dismissing them as "uneducated" and "blind sheep" alienates people even more.
1 reply →
Absolutely. Janones won this election. Let's see if he will be part of the government or will be sidelined again.
Janones was not leading a cult, this is just absurd. He was not telling people what to believe or how to behave AT ALL - he was just giving directions on what to do on social media to win the elections. Bolsonarism on the other hand is 100% a cult, from the beginning.
> It didn’t win in 2022 because he was completely bad in dealing with pandemics
And also because the entire state apparatus was engaged in unconstitutional censorship of his "centrally organized, cohesive, persistent online engagement" machine, which is what wins elections, as you noted.
And now that Janones set up his own "Lula's Army", Brazilian institutions did not manifest even a fraction of the energy they had shown while persecuting Bolsonaro.
Lula was allowed to do everything Bolsonaro was persecuted for in 2022. He even lowered taxes on fuels, and got away with it. The tax cut ends tomorrow.
Are humans still involved in summarizing? Why is "What you need to know" missing the vote count even though the title is about votes?
AFAIK the final numbers are not out yet, the electoral commission called it because Lula's margin is sufficiently large that Bolsonaro mathematically cannot win.
An area of Amazon forest roughly the size of the US state of New Jersey has remained standing due to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s leadership of Brazil, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-lula-presidency-saved-a...
for those partying https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vL--PrvsJ0
Once again, a clear anti-Bolsonaro vote from the majority of the electorate. Lula won because he got last-minute support from the moderates and even some right-wingers. It certainly does not feel like a victory of the left.
Now he will face a much bigger opposition in Congress and therefore will have to find a middle ground.
I expect his policies to move even further to the right. This might pave the way for his vice-president Alckmin, a historical right-winger, to run in the 2030 elections — likely against São Paulo’s governor Tarcísio de Freitas, also a right-winger and considered more moderate than the Bolsonaros despite being associated with them.
(reposting my own comment from a related thread)
The margin is a little close, so is the Senate expected to be deadlocked? Or is there a coalition that can form between moderates and the left?
I wouldn’t say deadlocked but the coalition between moderates and the left isn’t a given. There are many centrist parties who will likely alternate between supporting and opposing the government depending on the issue.
Legislative branch in Brazil never deadlocks. Coalitions are a very natural part of our democracy.
1 reply →
Senate is very right wing.
i don't know why you were downvoted. any turn to the moderation/center seems good news to me. those crazy swings between extremes left or right are just bad. i have never voted for both bolsonaro neither lula and crave for something closer to the center.
lula is a little less crazy (compared to bolsonaro), likely not anti-science, preserves the amazon, seems to care about keeping the same constituition and so on, but he heaves his hand when it comes to (mostly populist) spending, like there's no tomorrow.
he thinks he is helping the poor, but it is just for short term. so much public debt, in a few years everyone, rich or poor, will have pay the price, with interest. people that likes him usually say they don't like milei, but his incredible debt build up is actually a future-milei magnet.
also, after so much terms and "custo brazil" ("Brazilian (Business) Cost Burden"?) still prohibitive, the country never goes up from its terrible positions in making business rankings. one can just not hope he does anything better now after so much terms. his spending is too demand biased.
> he heaves his hand when it comes to (mostly populist) spending, like there's no tomorrow
This is key to his reelection. He literally ran on a "Bolsonaro will end Bolsa Família" campaign.
It's unfortunate. Lula inherited a post-Washington consensus neoliberal Brazil. He had nearly 20 years to undo all that and reindustrialize the country, thereby putting us on China's path.
I would have voted for him regardless of ideology if he had done it, but he didn't. It's just easier to just anesthetize the population and put them on paliative care with free money.
> he thinks he is helping the poor, but it is just for short term.
This "short term" is unbearably long... But I do see signs that the system is reaching its limits. Government was already having trouble paying pensions before Vorcaro.
> so much public debt, in a few years everyone, rich or poor, will have pay the price, with interest.
Bankers love Lula for a reason. Record profits.
I would call this a defensive victory. The left’s best chance was a 0-0 draw, so they put everyone in defense and managed to prevent the right from scoring a victory goal.
moving to the right would be a trap. (cf. Dem party vs Trump) The left must instead build an anti-right wing narrative. People vote on material benefits so delivering more of those should be top priority—I think Trumps slump in the US proves that.
Nobody wants to see them cut taxes from the rich or reduce employers rights. The popular "right" in Brazil wants taxes to be easier to pay, judges not to decide based on who is asking, and clear rules on what you can or can't do.
Also, nobody can beat Dilma on cutting taxes from the rich.
Fascism loses, maybe there is hope for the rest of the world.
"Lula's re-election will strengthen Brazil's ties with Russia, Brazilian Workers Party congressman Reimont Otoni told TASS"
The world is more complex than "fascist" vs "communist"
Bolsonaro was also friendly towards Russia. Any president will be. Brazil depends on their fertilizers.
3 replies →
I get that BRICS is world-domination wise scary to the US, but I don't really think the rest of the world fears that sans the US's warmongering.
2 replies →
I don't know enough about their available options to know how bad this is.
Are you taking this single congressman's word as fact?
1 reply →
Only if you beat the fascists. Otherwise it gets real black-and-white real fast
Lol, you this dumb? Lula is insanely corrupt as well. Can you define fascism or is it just what your feed is telling you to say now days just like everyone libs disagreed with before was a pdf file until it lost its meaning. Then we were racists until that lost its meaning.. now onto fascism. Until that also loses its meaning.
O no downvotes waaaaa the libs are picking on me i am going to cryyyyyy
Who is we? Bolsonaro supporters?
Can you define fascism?
7 replies →
Parabéns Lula! Uffaaaaaa
Heartening after all the interference the US and its oligarchs threw at this election.
I am not from Brazil, nor am I closely following its politics, but I would like to pose a genuine question: in a modern liberal democracy, doesn’t a four-term presidency represent too much power concentrated in one person?
Yes.
no. as presidency is not a dictatorship
The one good thing about the current system is that shitheads like musk can spend half-a-billion to buy elections, but the people still have the final say.
Interestingly the current "lets stop corporations from spending money on elections" that's popular in several states - wouldn't directly touch Musk because he can just spend the money directly.
I don't think "Oooh. Scary muslims!" works any less well if it's required to say "Elon Musk" rather than "American Apple Pie Goodness PAC" or whatever.
It might make a difference for smaller donors, especially if they're more sensitive about their personal PR.
The US is going to need a constitutional amendment to undo the Citizens United decision. Unlimited money in politics is anything but free speech.
As demonstrated in 2024 with democrat billionaires trying and failing to buy the election :)
[flagged]
That's assuming no gerrymandering and funny business at the polls.
gerrymandering is not possible with Brasil electoral system
1 reply →
>gerrymandering
I don't know the specifics of Brazil's system, but at least in the US gerrymandering has nothing to do with the Presidency or Senate, only the House. It's also not without risk. Gerrymandering is bad, but it doesn't change the totals of votes; it attempts to reapportion "excess" votes yielding a large win margin in one area to give winning, but necessarily smaller, margins in more areas. Amongst other challenges though that smaller margin means if there is a wave then a gerrymander can turn into a "dummymander" where previously safe districts get flipped.
>funny business
This is actually pretty dang hard in anything but a total sham, and even then is at least obvious it happened. Some timy fiddling at the margins may be possible to sneak through, and yeah some elections that might make the difference. But that can't counter any serious victory. The more common technique seems to be trying to suppress the vote. But as well as also not being trivial it also too risks backfiring by motivating people much harder. There is a lot of human psychology around "loss", people often absolutely hate things being taken from them even if they were complacent about having them.
3 replies →
Gerrymandering doesn’t change the fact that the voters decide the results. Most electoral systems already give unequal weight to different votes based on district sizes etc., so gerrymandering is only a change of degree and intention, not of how democracy fundamentally works.
2 replies →
https://x.com/AlexanderSoros/status/2114508265643983067
Need I say more?
Yes, please say more, I have no idea what you're saying.
Wait, what did he do besides be happy that a fascist isn't in charge of the future of the Amazon?
4 replies →
So can we stop panicking about money in elections or
No.
No, this much money in politics is still very dangerous.
A major reason it isn't working for now is because Donald Trump is, in addition to being a corrupt autocrat, incredibly incompetent. We shouldn't have to rely on that next time.
1 reply →
Absolutely the fuck not.
Nope. Money still buys votes. It's just that Musk is so opaquely unpopular outside of the US that it negates his riches. Which really says something.
3 replies →
Not really. A biased coin doesn't need to be biased 99% (to 1%) for it to matter.
wasn't musk heavily quoted in physics and tech books until his politics became center stage?
Serious question: why would he be "heavily" quoted in physics books? I didn't think he was a physicist, is he?
13 replies →
You’re making the claim. Back it up.
Not really. He had a really good PR person that made people think this, but most technologists are focused on, y’know, actual technology
no
[flagged]
In this thread.. people whose context on the election ranges from “i saw it on my feed a week ago and have a really valid opinion” to “that one guy is a total fascist”. HN you are full on retarded
I truly hate what HN has become. It has all the expected comments about Musk, fascism, etc. This is exactly why I stopped going to reddit.
Just a friendly gesture that there's still independents/non-partisan's here. We're a dying breed, but it seems to the the inevitable outcome when politics becomes a religion.
In current times only cowards and deadbeats are non partisan.
1 reply →
Buddy, ICE is chasing down and killing US citizens. Musk is openly supporting European neo-Nazis. The US tech sector is supporting the genocide of Palestinians, and interfering with foreign elections.
12 replies →
Yeah it's a really bad echo chamber, hard to find any system that is not built around group thinking
True.
So you're not against fascism?
Anglo-American media spend the 2000s and 2010s accusing Denmark of being fascist.
The word is absolutely meaningless now.
A shocking number of people aren't against fascism, as long as you don't use the actual word to describe what they support.
And when you correctly use the word to describe what they are supporting, you are inciting violence.
1 reply →
O'Sullivan's First Law: "Any organization not explicitly right-wing will eventually become left-wing"
Usually laws are based on some kind of observable reality.
5 replies →
Really unexpected.
Polymarket was like 80% Bolsonaro Jr to 20% Lula 7pm, 7:15 it changed to 60% Lula. There were multiple reports in the news websites about it favoring Bolsonaro which itself probably made some people vote for him.
I'm quite happy with the result tho. Let's see how the far right opposition will take this loss. I'm already expecting the worse.
Maybe these prediction markets are less useful than has been claimed.
20% happens about 1 in 5 times. I know that's snarky wording but 20% shots come though constantly in daily life.
I think as humans we are really bad at intuition about probabilities, and it being an election only makes it much worse. I don't think anyone is consciously conflating these with poll numbers but percentages of voters are the numbers we see a lot more than prediction markets, and 80% is idunno an 80% chance of getting between 50% and 54% of the vote or something.
4 replies →
If he has an 80% chance to win that means Polymarket will be "wrong" 20% of the time. And 80% seems fair given he was leading in the polls by a razor thin but consistent margin.
2 replies →
They were never useful for the results, just for market expectation, which is never the same as real chances of something happening
Maybe it's useful for people spending money to present the odds they wish for?
They are good at some markets but they don’t understand latam and especially Brazilian politics in the least so whatever makes it into the US news drives the market although it is normally wrong
and more manipulated for intended public influence than realized
this kind of gambling ought be made illegal along with the explicit in-pocket gambling
want to gamble, go to a physical place,
constant, easy access apps are already showing harm
A 20% chance of Lula winning is still a real chance of winning. A standard rule of thumb would require 2 standard deviations aka 5% aka p<0.05 for relative certainty.
If you think this result with those odds is unexpected, you must have never played X-Com :)
We saw how they took it last time.
Not really. If you follow anyone who has been covering latam for a long time they had odds of this election at a coinflip.
If the new right wing senate manages to at least impeach some supreme court judges, I'll still call it a major win.
Surprising to see Bolsonaro lose at this point, but the real upset of this election was caused by the senate. The whole point of electing the right wing was to impeach the judges. So long as that happens, I will be satisfied.
The next four years were going to seriously suck for Flávio. Now the economic bomb is going to explode in Lula's hands. I was tempted to vote for Lula myself just to make that happen. It's the supreme court issue that stopped me.
Lula's barely fit for his position as president too. He might resign and let the vice-president deal with it. Also an acceptable outcome.
What do you get out of posting on HN that you want to destroy your country?
1 reply →
Lula used a justice he appointed to order polling stations to stay open past the agreed upon deadline without consulting the courts that are supposed to rule on election matters. That's election interference. I'm not convinced the population is going to see him as legitimate after that stunt.
Brazilian here. It was unprecedented but not unreasonable, given problems with availability of public transportation in a number of locations. Both sides asked for extensions, although in different places that would favour their own bases. A nationwide extension was the best option, even if it was semi-botched due to the time it was decided. Also, the vote difference between Lula and Bolsonaro was much larger than any additional voting would have delivered.
Bolsonaro also sought extra voting time as well. He wanted it done only in certain states but it was granted nationwide. He was very involved in this process and is now crying foul because it wasn't done in a matter exclusively favorable to him!
Heaven forbid more voters get to chance to cast their vote!
And FWIW Bolsonaro was also asking the polling stations to stay open longer.
It’s a tough position to fight for: “Lula only won because too many people voted for him!”.
I think you are equivocating. Denying people their vote indeed counts as election tampering but that doesn’t mean giving more people the vote is also bad.
Flavio asked for the same thing. Stop spreading fake news.
What I wrote happened. It's not "fake news". What remains to be seen is which polling stations remained open and which did not. This election may need to be annulled.
2 replies →
[flagged]
An opaque, illegal system. Brazilian law states votes must be counted publicly.
And now, any hopes of a paper trail have been permanently laid to rest.
Deeply unfortunate, but not entirely unexpected. Lula was allowed to do every "electoral crime" they barred Bolsonaro from doing in 2022. They even extended voting time, a move that directly benefiting him, and also ruled illegal back in 2022.
Gotta look on the bright side. Bolsonaro was closer to US interests than I'd like. If the elected right wing senate manages to at least impeach some supreme court justices next year, I'm going to be OK with this.
I submitted the news too and it got flagged:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50237256
Please don't share half the context.
Many cities had their mayor cancelling free public transportation and stopping people from going voting. Extending the time is a reaction, not a first action. Furthermore, the ask didn't come just from Lula's party, it came from both candidates [1].
2022 Brazil had the Federal Police Director actively interfering with transportation as well.
[1] - https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/eleicoes/o-que-diz-o-codigo-ele...
Busses with a Lula insignia on it? That's an electoral crime, and probably why they were stopped from circulating. Just yet another one to the list.
They called for extension back in 2022 too, and it was ruled illegal. "Everybody had the chance to vote", said Alexandre de Moraes.
"They even extended voting time, a move that directly benefiting him"
Both candidates supported that decision.
Both sides asked to extend the hours. The court took the action. I don't really know brazillian politics and what happened in the past but thought I'd point that out.
Abstainees were thought to be the biggest source of new votes for Lula in the 2nd round of elections. I think such a move benefited Lula far more than it did Flávio.
It's also inconsistent with the court's own precedent. Extending voting hours was deemed illegal back in 2022. "Everybody had the chance to vote", said Alexandre de Moraes.
After Lula lost in the 1st round, suddenly it became legal again. The irony is not lost on me. That's the pattern with the leftist judges in the courts. The supreme court judge who decided it used to be Lula's own lawyer.
3 replies →
What are the other crimes? Extending time would rarely be bad, and it seems both candidates approved it.
Back in 2022, Lula's party used to be against Bolsonaro's "digital militias". They engaged everybody they had in the superior and supreme courts in order to censor it all. It was disgusting.
This time around, some guy in Lula's party created "Lula's Army", a channel with millions of people in it. Suddenly, it was fine.
They used to cry about "fake news" and call for censorship at every opportunity, and they'd get it because they own the courts. Now they were the ones spreading "fake news" of all sorts. Did they get censored? Nah.
Censorship in Brazil is unconstitutional, by the way. Political censorship is doubly so. It doesn't matter, because they own the supreme court.
There are no laws in Brazil, there is only what the supreme court wants. Whatever they write on a piece of paper becomes law, and police obeys it. They are the true seat of power in this country.
4 replies →
> submitted the news too and it got flagged
Please review the HN guidelines:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I was just linking it for completeness. My submission was flagged, but this one wasn't. Guidelines don't explain the difference.
This is a very confusing comment. Most on this side don't know the insider informing the Brazilian elections, and we only know the public news
Can you explain?
You are right winger but don't like the Brazilian right wing aligning with the US right wing, but do like the politicians who are aligned with the US right wing?
I'm kinda trying to move past left/right labels. I'll try to explain.
Bolsonaro generally supports privatizing Brazilian state companies and selling them off to foreigners. I don't want that. Especially not to the US and Israel.
Lula on the other hand is better aligned with China, which is also what I want.
Lula and myself are aligned on these two points. So this outcome is not entirely bad for me.
The problem I have with Lula is his party's obnoxious taxation, lack of a real plan for reindustrialization, continuous defense of criminals, and most importantly, his total domination of the supreme court. I voted for the right specifically to see those judges impeached and imprisoned, because I absolutely oppose everything they did in 2022, far more than I ever opposed Lula himself. I'm of the opinion that presidents and elections barely matter anymore, because it's the supreme court that runs the country. It's the Venezuela governance model: president appoints god-like supreme court judges and rules monocratically through them.
The 1st round this month was such an upset not because of Bolsonaro but because of the senate. They are the ones who can impeach supreme court judges, and when Brazil unexpectedly elected a right wing majority in the senate, it struck true fear into the court. This was our chance to completely wipe out that court and forever change the history of this country, like Bukele did for El Salvador.
While in the end the necessary victory didn't materialize, Brazilian senate is still absolute majority right wing now, and they could still impeach those judges. I'm not going to hold out hope for that anymore, but if I see at least one judge bite the dust I'll still call it a major win.
Why unfortunate?
Bolsonaro-aligned mayors deliberately blocked busses from running that would take people to the polls in Lula-supporting neighborhoods. Emergency legal decisions allowed voting times to extend as a response to this. By the margin of votes, it wouldn't have mattered.
1 reply →
> Lula was allowed to do every "electoral crime" they barred Bolsonaro from doing in 2022. They even extended voting time, a move that directly benefiting him, and also ruled illegal back in 2022.
1 reply →
Closer to US interests? What a joke. Better luck next time, I guess.
I don't get it. Are you agreeing with me?
Lula and Bolsonaro are two sides of the same coin: a stupid tribalism were each side feeds on the hatred for the other.
Both will lead the country to pork-barrel, corruption and government paralysis by debt. Both are "unfortunate".
There are 2 solutions for all Brazilian problems: Guarulhos and Galeão. The rest is just circus.
Yeah, I agree completely. I didn't vote for any of these candidates, I voted to impeach the supreme court.
There is exactly one politician that once upon a time represented me: Dr. Enéas Carneiro. Ironically, his ideas were closest to the Chinese Communist Party. He's dead now.
The left wing has PCO, a real left wing party, and I agree with them on a daily basis. They're shunned by everyone, and were even persecuted by the supreme court along with the right wing.
I'm increasingly resigned to the idea that immigration is the only option by now.
The amount of mental gymnastics people will do to support fascist dictator wannabes is truly insane. For your sake I hope you find reality.
[flagged]
Saying HN is leftist is an insult to anyone with actual leftist beliefs.
You guys always make moderate to center left politicians sound so much cooler than they really are.
[dead]
Oh no, not the hammer and sickle! Cover your children's eyes!
[flagged]
[flagged]
It was extremely amusing. Brazilian election law generally sets 5 p.m. Brasília time as the deadline for closing polls. The judge who made the emergency ruling to pause counting and extend voting hours by 2 hours was Cristiano Zanin Martins - Lula's former personal attorney. The same guy who Lula nominated to the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil in June 2023.
Both candidates agreed to it. Please stop.
Yeah it’s alarming how much HN users are willing to support corruption so long as it’s their preferred candidate doing it. Really is all just tribalism to most posters in this thread so far
4 replies →