Brazilian presidential and general elections 2022 (1st round: October 2nd, 2nd round: October 30th)

[parochial boy]

Being parochial, apparently the police had to intervene in the polling station in Geneva after Bolsonaro supporters started getting aggressive. Happened in the first round as well.

(typically the Brazilians here vote fash, but Lula actually won Geneva with 50,7% today, compared to Bolsonaro getting 64% four years ago)

[parochial boy]

This story about the police in the Nordests seems to be snowballing. Could lead to the polling stations being closed later so that people can actually vote. And if extending opening times to let voters in the North East  goes in tandem with a narrow Lula victory, well then you can imagine how that will go down with Bolsonaro supporters...

[parochial boy]

Looking at Porto Alegre and Sao Paulo, both Lula and Bolsonaro seem to be improving by the same amount on their first round scores. More for for the looking positive news.

[parochial boy]

Looking at Porto Alegre and Sao Paulo, both Lula and Bolsonaro seem to be improving by the same amount on their first round scores. More for for the looking positive news.

As a resident of both cities, this is disappointing for me. I expected Lula opening a bigger advantage in the 2 capitals. But at least a consistent advantage.

Porto Alegre in particular, given its history for the left wing movement and hosting the World Social Forum and all, it was really sad to see it vote Bolsonaro in 2018. So it's kind of a happy moment to see it going back to Lula this time

[parochial boy]

Gap is at about 530k votes now. It was over 700k at 35% so even that is still moving down quickly enough

[parochial boy]

Stop derailing the thread with loaded questions and saying "cope". This is not a thread debating whether suspending elections is good or bad. I simply voiced my frustration with the results.

But why... even sign up to a forum about elections if you hate democracy and freedom?

[parochial boy]

I think this has been answered in the past, but why is Brasília a stronghold of the right? Comparable cities like Ottawa, Washington, and Canberra are stronghold of left-of-centre establishment parties.

It is interesting.  Only place in Europe & North America I can think of still like this is Madrid, but it also financial centre too and largest city so civil servants probably have less impact.  Stockholm as recently as a decade ago voted to right of Sweden, but now usually votes to left of it.  Lisbon still votes slightly to right of Portugal although left won it in last two elections.  At subnational level, Quebec City is a good example as it tends to be more conservative than most of Quebec.  So Brasilia is not only but it seems in North American & Europe such cities are exceptions not norm while in Latin America seems more common.

In Latin America, Santiago has started consistently voting to the left of Chile as a whole and Petro overperformed in Bogota. On the other hand, Buenos Aires votes to the right of the country which is complicated by the fact that the city is a stronghold of anti-Peronism of both the right and the left, so non-Peronist left parties do pretty well there.

Although I think part of the comparison in the original post was in that Brasilia was a purpose chosen/built capital city. As in they none of them are the largest cities of principle economic centres of their respective countries. Which in turn means that they are all particularly dominated by civil servants and public sector workers in a way that other capital cities aren't. Which you would sort of instinctively think would make them particularly receptive to the left.

The only European capitals that might be comparable would be Bern; and potentially The Hague but for the fact it isn't technically the capital (and St Peterbsurg but for the fact it actually stopped being the capital quite along time ago. And even if Bern has some superficial similarities, it is still a much older city and political centre and not really comparable.

Plenty of examples in Africa (eg Yamoussoukro) or Asia (eg Naypyidaw or Isalamabad) that tend to suffer the fact of not being democracies meaning there isn't really much to say about their voting habits.

[parochial boy]

Returning to the subject of Brazil, so as not to get too far off topic. I think the left here follows the same path. Lula is the last bastion of the "deep left". The "new left" is copying the US/Europe model and its new leaderships are all like that.

However, as Brazilian demography is different, the result will be a massive loss of votes, as the majority of the Brazilian population is poor and does not have higher education. The right does not seem to have any desire to improve the educational level of Brazilians and the left without votes.

Which for me always raises the question: why? Why does the left in country after country keep doing this? What on earth makes left-wingers in places like Brazil think that it's a model that will succeed there when it's toxic even in the societies for which it was designed?

Diverting somewhat from the topic of Brazil here, I don't think it is exactly intentional on the whole, or in most places.

A recent bit of analysis came out here essentially looking at what the Socialists do - the legislation they bring into parliament, the referendums they launch, what they campaign on, in practice. Almost without exception, it is traditional left wing fare: minimum wages, more funding for the welfare state and public services, higher taxes on the rich and on and on. And like everywhere, they are constantly met with the accusation of only being interested in the "woke" perferences of the educated middle class.

So why is this? Well the - especially right wing - media narrative puts all the focus on those issues. Constantly bringing up the most marginal and irrelevant stories. The right wing parties also only talk about this, precisely because they know the core of their own ideology has simply run out of intellectual ground in light of its recurrent failures. So the left, because it is still fundamentally the left, is forced onto the back foot and into defending anti-racism, LGBT rights or even things as basic as the institutions of liberal democracy. Because it is morally the right thing to do. But this also then merely serves to fuel the accusation that they are only interested in the preferences of the culturally liberal educated classes.

And this is what happens in country after country.

It's Gramscian really, but then at the same time, people aren't going to be dupe forever. There's only such much you can yell about a white guy with dreadlocks getting thrown out of a bar before people realise that their material living conditions continuing decline is maybe a little bit more important, and that on that issue, the conservatives have nothing to offer.