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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.
Context: Reuters reports that Brazil's Federal Highway Police conducted widespread roadblocks specifically targeting public busses in the (left leaning ) north-east of the country. After being explicitly ordered not to stop busses on voting day. The highway police is apparently obviously pro-Bolsonaro.
Several sources (as of yet only in Portuguese) also report irregularities with public transportation (~50% of busses being ordered to stay in their depots on voting day in - left leaning - Salvador and São Paulo), with the secretary of transportation in Salvador now having an order of arrest on him for his role in this instruction.. Public transport officials claim the busses were stickered with pro-Lula messages, and they just wanted to prevent being accused of illegally running political ads through the city...
But it seems like the the extended voting time was specifically ordered to compensate for perceived voter suppression. The courts also ordered all busses to be released from their depots, stickered or not.
I could definitely see that. Brazil seems like the natural evolution of what's happening in America where both parties are more focused on managing who votes rather than trying to convince people to change their minds. Sadly, this is probably a dominant strategy in a diverse, socialist country given what we know about patronage systems.
Ridiculous from either end.
Brazil didn’t get here from a stereotypical American democracy. Its current government only dates back to the early 90s, and I’m not sure it’s had an uncontroversial election since 2006. Police putting a thumb on the scale is more like a throwback to its junta days.
Nor does American partisanship drag us in that direction. The current squabbles over voter protections have more to do with putting a particular sort of strongman in office, and the ones over nativism and immigration are what happens when a big chunk of the population feels economically insecure. No patronage required.
Of course America is headed this direction. Non-European immigrants vote D by supermajority numbers which is why Democrats want to open the borders and give them amnesty. This does not require some outrageous leap. Biden let in something like 15 million illegals. It isn't some prediction for the future. It already happened. And it's already the stated position of most leading Democrats to give illegal immigrants amnesty and a path to citizenship. Please don't pretend this is some crazy conspiracy theory.
If only the Rs would stop pursuing policies detrimental to Non-European immigrants, they might end up voting more R, like how Latinos now do. No party is entitled to the vote of anybody.
The fact that immigrants don't assimilate, but instead demand assimilation of the native population to them is all the more reason to slam the door shut and keep it that way forever.
Non-European immigrants are fundamentally more liberal, and it's not because they were treated poorly by Republicans. They were that way the second they landed.
Too bad that there are plenty of others already in your country that disagree, and they'll vote against you and your policies for very justifiable reasons from their side.
The R's offer is basically "the beatings will continue until morale improves", and then they act shocked when voters completely rationally vote D instead.
And who says immigrants don't assimilate. Imagine they all assimilated fully into D subcultures and values and voted D even harder. Something tells me you wouldn't like that eithe.
As they say, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. Second best time is today.
We should have halted immigration long ago. But we didn't. So we'll have to cater to the demands of voters who are already here. But the point of winning elections needs to be to halt all future immigration so we won't have to make even more concessions to even more future leftists.
Your example of the Tories being a successful party (likely a troll comment, we get it) is perfect. If you only survive by losing on literally ever issue and floating with the wind, nothing of value was conserved. The Tories are a nothing party, just a hollow shell.
Likewise, no one cares about the Republican Party in itself. They care about America.
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