Brazil is having an interesting presidential election.
There were 11 candidates running in the general election. Brazil has a kind of ranked choice system for voting. Brazil, as a country, allows for a wider expression of politics than a system that is a much more limited and restricted in terms of representation and expression of political thought and ideology such as we have here in the United States where two political parties, republican and democratic, dominate the electoral process and impose their rules on the electoral process of the states and the country as a whole. Another major difference between Brazil’s and the US’s electoral systems is that Brazil has no such thing as an electoral college so the vote is the vote. It’s the voice of the people. The people of Brazil elect their president, not a group of 538 partisan political operatives, the electoral college, after the popular vote has taken place. In Brazil, the eligible voters of the 213 million plus people get to elect their president. The Brazilian vote is not fraught with all of the ways that an election can turn into a constitutional crisis because of the electoral college, such as fake electors, disrupting or preventing certification, and using the electoral college to ensure minority rule over majority rule and obliterating the importance of the popular vote by overriding it.
None of the 11 candidates running in the presidential election received 50% or more of the vote which would have meant that the winner won the election outright. So, the top two vote getters will now go on to a runoff election on October 30.
The top two candidates are a liberal former union leader and former president of Brazil, and a fascist far right megalomaniac similar in temperament and politics to Trump. The two candidates could not be more different from one another.
The former president was a union leader and a liberal who has had legal problems related to corruption. His legacy as president is that he had to deal with corruption scandals, but also because he did a lot of good for the country and pulled millions of Brazilians out of poverty with his programs.
The incumbent, a fascist, who is known for his inflammatory and provocative targeting of women and the LGBTQ community and for his desire to eliminate gun control laws and his promotion of gun violence, has also been responsible for policies that open up the Amazon for vast deforestation and violence against indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin.
On October 30, I am hoping that Brazil will elect the man who made the lives of so many Brazilians more secure with food security and anti-poverty measures, and that they will retire the current president who is a man who has inflamed the country with his violent and divisive rhetoric and done a great deal of harm to the global climate and devastated the vast precious resources of the Amazon.
Brazil deserves a president who will work for the people. I hope that they can forgive his sins of corruption and look past them, vote for him, and let him get back to work for the people of Brazil.
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