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

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I see that a lot of people posting in this thread have never followed a Brazilian election before.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I don't know if there's any way to know this exactly, but Evangelicals in Brazil are way, way, way to the right of Catholics, that much is for sure.

All I know is that they're capital 'H' Heretics and thus not in any meaningful sense Christians, but there's no clear relationship between that and their politics, even if there might be some rather more complex ones.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It always was, really, even if the weirdly universal Lusophone tendency towards sinistrisme confuses things at first. The era of PT dominance was a remarkable exception.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Rio has been electorally very weird (even for Brazil) for a long time: it has never been a 'typical' big city and has always been prone to demagogic politics of one shade or another. There was a time when this benefited the PT somewhat, but that is now long past - a distant memory. It is worth looking at the results last time:

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Turnout usually drops a little between the first and second rounds and essentially no one switches from their first round choice if that first round choice makes it into the final round: this alone makes polling, in theory, a lot easier for the runoff.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Traffic police as a means of attempted vote-suppression is... a new one.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Are there likely to be exit polls or is it just the long count?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A useful thing to keep in mind would be the change in percentage points that Lula needs to hit 50% from the first round: 1.6%.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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.

The official position of this forum is that democracy is a positive good, suspending democracy because an election goes the 'wrong' way is bad, and that you're a whiny little fascist creep. It's fine not to like the outcome of an election. We've all experienced that! It is not fine to react to that with a stated desire to impose an actual dictatorship.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Why did Bolsonaro win Rio De Janiero?? I thought that was a fairly left-wing city

It used to be, but in recent decades it has been prone to demagogic politics from all directions, which has sometimes worked out well for the Left and sometimes very much not.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

He lives in Sao Paulo but his background is Northeastern and he's universally seen as fundamentally a Northeastern politician, in much the way that Woodrow Wilson was fundamentally a Southern politician despite having been Governor of New Jersey--or perhaps a somewhat more intense version of Obama's relationship with Hawaii, since Lula apparently left the Northeast very young.

Harold Wilson and the West Riding of Yorkshire would be another example. Left Milnsbridge as a teenager, but always kept that Huddersfield accent, poor man.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Brasilia's big rightwards swing - it used to vote to the left of the country as a whole - makes sense considering the caste (there isn't a better word for it, so it will serve) issue that has become such an important feature of Brazilian voting patterns in recent decades. It also lacks working class voters who are also higher up the caste tree (a demo that continues to be quite loyal to Lula it seems) and middle class voters who have sufficient liberal sensibilities to find the reality of Bolsonaro in power less appealing than sticking it to the PT again. Not surprising that it wouldn't have many of the first, but the latter is intriguing and probably could do with some sort of explanation. But in the end it makes sense from one angle: it's a dreadful city, so it is right that it has dreadful politics.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

middle class voters who have sufficient liberal sensibilities

I don't understand this, wouldn't civil servants be heavily overrepresented in that demographic ?

Quite! This is what seems peculiar and could do with an explanation.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I'm curious because Brasilia seems to have similar racial demographics to Brazil as a whole, so if Al is referring to "race"/cor I'd love some elaboration.

Essentially not everyone in the pardo racial category is socially equal. Someone with 'one foot in the kitchen', to use Cardoso's sly description of himself, is not so very different from someone with exclusive European ancestry and would once have routinely checked the 'white' box on a census: finding a sense of pride in having some 'rougher' ancestry is not inconsistent with a refusal to cheerfully give up all social privileges of course.* It's all very murky and complicated.

_{*From a British perspective it reminds me a little of people from families that have been solidly upper middle class for multiple generations liking to be able to point to a branch of the family a bit further back that wasn't. Very different social phenomena and dynamics, yes, but there are some psychological similarities at work.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Seeing a lot of comments from people from USA/Europe here, I'm not surprised why the working class in these countries has come to vote for the right/far right. The left in these countries has become a party of educated rich from downtown and Woke culture. I would always prefer a party that looks more at the poorest and most marginalized.

That's not even exactly accurate in the United States (the poorest sections of the electorate still largely vote for the Democratic Party, the principal issue is a little further up: of course this is due to the racialized nature of socio-economic divisions in the USA and there is no longer the same level of relatively uniformity amongst the voting habits of poor people that existed as recently as a decade and a half ago) and is very much not accurate elsewhere.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Is it fair to say that Latin America's marked by a certain kind of "class solidarity" that you don't see in large sections of US and Europe?

The 2018 election in Brazil would heavily suggest not. The big swing towards Lula in industrial areas in the south of the country was critical to getting him over the line and has (wrongly) been missed by some commentators who are keener to discuss other dramatic movement, but there's a reason why 'a big swing' was required.