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Notes -
Time to check up on our Lusotropicalism enjoyers.
The Brazilian Presidential election ended yesterday, featuring a run-off between Lula da Silva and Flavio Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro, the son of jailed former President Jair Bolsonaro, had won the previous round. Prediction markets placed his odds of winning at roughly 80%.
But Lula ended up winning, and not without controversy.
Apparently, a Supreme Court justice, and a former personal attorney of Lula's, added two extra hours to the voting period in a last second decision. There have been claims that voting in Bolsonaro-friendly areas had already been finalized and could not been restarted. One person on X claimed "it's as if voting restarted, but only in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Baltimore". I am not sure how accurate this claim is.
Bolsonaro is not accepting the results of the election. There are calls for the election results to be annulled, especially if it turns out the extra voting period was decisive. The situation is perhaps mitigated by the fact that conservatives now control a large majority of the legislature and may be able to immediately impeach Lula and, more importantly, his judges.
Perhaps someone who understands the situation can weigh in. From my outsider's view it seems that, in Brazil, individual Supreme Court justices wield nearly unchecked power and can make last second Banana Republic type decisions like opening the polls for an extra two hours. Brazilian politics feel like American ones, just more so.
The Brazilian stock market is down by 25% overnight.
Personally (as a non-Brazillian): I believe Lula is corrupt, he's been pressuring online companies with shoddy evidence to censor his opposition. But I don't believe Bolsonaro would be any better, and (unlike Venezuela) I haven't yet seen solid evidence of election fraud (despite prediction markets being wrong, exit polls were accurate, and extending deadlines usually hinders vote suppression). Maybe a divided government is the best outcome, which is a shame, because it's more pragmatically the least worst outcome.
The claim I'm seeing is that the judge and Lula coordinated to extend the votes in areas they control but only AFTER the voting machines had been closed and locked in the Bolsonaro areas, thus allowing them to guarantee victory because they knew exactly how many votes they needed. I don't claim to know if this is true or not.
The financial markets think he would be. For perspective, a 25% drop in the stock market would be the single worst day in history in the U.S. markets. Although probably only half of this is the result of the outcome, with the other half being the chaotic way in which it happened.
A couple questions I have:
I wonder if there will be an independence movement from the wealthier southern parts of the country?
I wonder if Flavio will flee the country. Feels like he could be imprisoned if he stays. (50% odds).
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