I’m back from holiday, and at an opportune time. Even in the bumper election year of 2024 I can’t recall there being a period of quite such concentrated interest as this. In the space of the next five weeks there will be four hugely important national elections – in Brazil, Israel, the United States and Spain – plus two big elections close to home (in New Zealand and Victoria), which, while less momentous in world terms, will generate a lot of interest.
So let’s start with Brazil, which goes to the polls tonight in the second round of its presidential election, pitting centre-left incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva against Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. In the first round, held three weeks ago, Bolsonaro led with 47.0% to Lula’s 45.2%, a lead of a bit less than two and a quarter million votes (see official results here).
Three other candidates had meaningful scores, each between 2% and 3%; two of them have endorsed Bolsonaro while the third has remained neutral. Turnout was 78.9%,* almost unchanged from 2022 and 2018. There’s nothing much in the way of factors that look as if they might enable Lula to turn things around. And of course the usual suspects, including Donald Trump, the tech bros and the Russians, are solidly in Bolsonaro’s corner.
Yet the opinion polls haven’t written Lula off. The last week’s worth of polling has him consistently only about a single point behind; two polls even gave him a (very narrow) lead. Those who want to believe in miracles have just enough evidence to be able to say that Bolsonaro can still be beaten.
Around the middle of this year Lula enjoyed a clear lead in the polls, but it never looked enough for confidence, particularly given the strikingly uniform movement to the right (which we’ve noted before) in South America over the last couple of years. Since about August the movement has been clearly in the wrong direction.
And this was eminently predictable. While I would unhesitatingly vote for him in preference to either of the Bolsonaros, Lula is not a strong candidate. He turns 81 next week and is in poor health; he has been twice convicted and once jailed for corruption (both convictions were later quashed) and is attempting to win a fourth term of office. Yet he resisted all calls for his replacement by a younger candidate.
The comparison with Joe Biden’s attempted re-election in 2024 is all too obvious. Biden eventually gave in and withdrew, but the damage had already been done. Brazil for a time appeared to be in better shape – Bolsonaro senior was unable to run again because, unlike Donald Trump, he had been convicted and imprisoned for his attempted insurrection (he is currently serving home detention). But his son proved an adequate substitute, and no doubt his victory would mean the speedy release of the father.
Biden was a thoroughly decent man and not a bad president, but his stubbornness and selfishness set his country and the world up for disaster. Now history seems set to repeat. Unless the aforesaid miracle should occur, Trump will have a morale-boosting win just before his own big electoral test in the US mid-term elections, and Brazilian democracy will face another time of trial.
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* The BBC describes this as a “record” low, which it might be as far as first round figures go, but recent years show almost no variation either from year to year or round to round.
