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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.
Nobody in S America could ever convince me that Democracy is better than Fascism. You see huge swaths of Brazil vote on ethnic lines. Brazil at this point probably at a minimum needs to be broken into different countries. I don’t see why White Europeans should be governed by a corrupt commie because a bunch of negros voted for it.
In trading sometimes you are better lucky than good. I bought some Brazilian stuff after prediction markets were good for Bolsonaro but before the first round and I’m quite happy today that I dumped them on the big rip after the first round. Now everything I bought is 10% lower than my first buy and I’m wandering if Brazil is cheap enough to buy even with Lulu.
Actually existing Fascism ended up with their cities reduced to rubble and their countries occupied by foreigners which a way worse outcome then electing some leftist. If you just mean right wing authoritarian governments South America had plenty of those too and it's not like they had spectacular results. Chile did but it also didn't all collapse when democracy was restored and they voted for leftwing parties. Do you really think life will be dramatically different under Lula then Bolsonaro? Both Lula and Bolsonaro's father were presidents before it hardly seem like a crisis. Jetisoning democracy gives the government way too much power which works ok if they are competent in South America this is unlikely regardless of if they are rightwing or leftwing.
Modern Brazil itself is the product of a rightwing dictatorship. Which hardly makes going back to that any kind of panacea。
This never happened in Spain.
Which notably was not Fascist. The Falange were the the Fascists party in Spain and if they'd had their way Spain would have joined the war and been bombed to rubble with the other Fascist powers.
At the time, Spain was referred to as fascist, and Franco a Falangist (which from what I can tell was technically true in the most amusing possible way).
I don't really have a dog in the "what counts as true fascism?" hairsplitting fight. If your point is that Franco was too smart fight a silly, self-destructive war in the name of ideology, I think you're right. But I also think that Franco's Spain would be widely reviled as fascist if it existed today (and it's still often referred to as fascistic).
I'm not saying this out of some pro-fascistic sensibility, by the way, it's just that Italy, Spain, and Germany were all having a moment during the 1930s and people sort of forget about Spain. Sort of how people forget what Vietnam got up to after the Vietnam war.
Franco’s government was a compromise party including basically the entire right wing of Spain and which spent its later years run as a de facto catholic theocracy.
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Sure and that all makes sense and I don't doubt that Francoist Spain would be reviled as Fascist. One of my hobby horses is that Fascist doesn't simply mean "right wing Authoritarian" The Fascist movements in Italy and especially Germany conceived of themselves as revolutionary and I personally do think they represented a true third way. Nazi Germany really represented something new, closer to ancient Assyria or the Khmer Rouge then the stodgy conservative Catholic governments that existed after or that Franco represented. The Nazis considered destroying Catholicism in Germany after the war for example and planned to create their own syncretic new religion.
Though Spain certainly was part of a moment in the 30s as you mention. But I think Spain's coalition of rightwing groups as a opposed to a unitary Fascist state together with Franco created a moderating influence that we wouldn't see in an ascendant Germany and to a lesser extent Italy.
Fascism actually has something of a defined political doctrine. Mussolini even wrote a book about it during his rise to power in Italy. In the early 20th century, elements of it were debated hotly by people sympathetic to its beliefs and there were disagreements, but it isn’t a “catch all” phrase the way it’s used to describe generic, top-down systems, or a every different close integration between the state and economic life. Fascist “corporatism,” isn’t just an agglomeration of public-private partnerships between SOE’s (which every Chinese business is a de facto part of), just because they operate it as a competitive enterprise in the market.
Germany and the Nazis were altogether a more interesting case. They fawned over agricultural life in a lot of ways and disliked what the program of industrialization does to social values and communal living. They had a doctrine they tried promulgating to more or less “phase out” religion that they called “Positive Christianity,” but it never really took with the rest of society. In Franco’s case, it’s a pity his federated system didn’t last, and by the time the rest of the larger theater of WW2 had clearly been decided for the Allies, whatever pockets remained of those ideologies were just going to be a matter of time before they dissolved into nothing. You had people like Leon Degrelle try and keep it alive in Belgium with the Rexist Party, but they weren’t going to overcome the historical trend moving against them by that point.
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