Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is likely to win Brazil's next election:
Lula, as he is widely known, appears poised to win Brazil’s presidential election. The question, polls suggest, isn’t whether he will beat far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, but when. Recent surveys have shown Lula with about 45% of the vote compared with 35% for Bolsonaro, putting Lula within striking distance to win outright by capturing at least half the vote in the first round of balloting Sunday.
When Bolsonaro won the presidency in 2018, it was understood as yet another step in the global march toward right-wing populism and the destruction of democracy. That was fair enough in an era that saw the rise of Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, and Boris Johnson.
But now it's four years later. Trump is out of office; Le Pen lost to Emmanuel Macron; Johnson resigned in disgrace; and Bolsonaro is about to lose to a socialist. Spain is ruled by a left-wing party. The Labour Party is 15% ahead of the Tories in the latest British polls. Social Democrats are back in power in Germany. In a recent poll, 58% of Americans said the MAGA movement threatens democracy. So where are the headlines telling us that authoritarianism is losing and democracy is back?
Granted, Orbán is still around; far-right leader Giorgia Meloni will probably form a new government in Italy; and Trump remains a force in American politics—though an increasingly spent one. The far-right party in Sweden also gained ground recently, but the conservative and liberal coalitions as a whole only swapped a grand total of two seats. Their new prime minister will be the head of the Moderate Party.
Overall, things are mostly swinging away from the far right even if few want to acknowledge it. But why not? Is it fear that people will stop fighting if they hear that they're winning? That's crazy.
The pendulum is swinging. The always fickle public is blaming the old guys for today's problems and chucking them out. The circle of life is complete.
So keep fighting! Our side is winning!
Lula isn't "my side" just because Bolsonaro is a limp-dicked fascist. I hope Lula wins but this isn't a good outcome, just one less worse than the other.
I just hope there's no coup attempt if Lula does win. And if all ends well, we should engage hard to keep Brazil headed in the right direction (i.e. not towards Venezuela and Cuba) but we won't since it's Latin America and we don't care.
If Lula appears certain to win, the military will intervene, with unprecedented violence. Lula will be first against the wall -- and Bolsonaro second.
I fear Labor will fail to win in Britain. They just seem to lose....
Murdoch wants a Labour Government this time -- and one with an independent majority, so that the SNP are not a complicating factor. He wants this so that he can break Labour for a human lifespan and bring back the Tories in such a manner that he totally owns them.
The struggle for power between the Press and the British constitutional institutions goes back to the First World War, when the first Lord Northcliffe replaced a Prime Minister (Asquith) who held him in deserved contempt with one (Lloyd George) who promised to do his bidding.
Labor are a bunch of well meaning but pathetic losers. The only bigger losers are the Liberal Democrats.
The Lib Dems sold out to David Cameron's minority government in 2010, & what they have to show for it is party leader Nick bringing the Stanky Clegg to facebook (meta).
And if Trump and MAGAs get control of the US in 2024 - and don't actually take over the election process - they will be ousted eventually. This is the way it works, especially in two-party systems, barring really catastrophic events like the Depression and WW II. If there is a recession or even if prosperity is not increased, some voters in the middle with try the other side. "Independents" are now the largest party.
It is remarkable how many people fail to understand this process and predict that one side will take over for the foreseeable future. In the US the center shifted to the right about 50 years ago when Republicans grabbed the Southern racists. In a way this has still been going on. The prediction that the US will shift left as the white proportion shrinks has been on hold, but may eventually come true.
>they will be ousted eventually
You assume they don't intend to dismantle the ability to of the proles to vote them out. That is a disastrously bad assumption.
If you put a Republican in the White House in 2024, that will be the end of the American Experiment in democracy. The best case will then be something Orban-like; I think that's unrealistically optimistic.
Depends if Congress is also Republican. If all three are back in GOP hands, then yes, it will be the End of All Things. Two out of three will be merely catastrophic (national debt default virtually assured due to GOP hostage-taking). Just the presidency would be horrible, but possibly survivable like it was under Trump.
"Ousted eventually" still happens, but if they can't be voted out the ousting tends to take longer and be much bloodier.
If you put a Republican in the White House in 2024, that will be the end of the American Experiment in democracy.
The arrival of autocracy does not mean the end of democracy for all time. Usually it means the latter takes a vacation. Spain spent about four decades under Fascism before the constitutional order was restored. That's sounds about right in the US context.
Spain had Europe enticing them to join. US aren't going have anything like that.
In some states (WI, NC) the voters have been increasingly voting out the Republican Party… yet those states still are largely run by the GOP thanks to gerrymandering and stripping Democratic governors of their powers.
Voting harder doesn’t always lead to change in party control of government in a two party system…
Waste of a post. Maga is a con. Do you understand???? Do you need a finger snapped??? Do you understand capital markets in collapse, bond spreads blowing out, states disbanding???? Are you a retard???? Wyoming would be the first state to go under. Rancher after rancher bankrupt..........sounds good. Let's do it.
Trump himself is toast. His arrest for espionage and likely arrest of Stone/Gullie for sedition which will be in the courts for years.
I find it marvelous that Sweden actually has a political party called the Moderate Party (or its equivalent in Swedish). I imagine that their rallies are rather calm affairs.
Then again, the Australian conservative party is called the Liberal Party.
Classical liberalism, a la Edmund Burke. Not Woke globalist shitlib #idpol like the US Democrat Party.
So more 18th century than 21st?
"58% of Americans said the MAGA movement threatens democracy"
which means fascists have just about an even chance to take power and end our democracy, given our system's quirky undemocratic features. The problem isn't that the public supports fascists. We don't. The problem is they might take over anyway.
Fascists????? Nope. Again are you retarded?????
Lula blames Ukraine and Russia equally for the war. That's not a big loss for fascism.
Don't worry, we are winning, just look at all these polls and imagine what that might occur at the ballots in the future!
Meloni's election was a protest vote -- people were pissed at the status quo, so they went for some shiny new toy who promised to end gridlock, get things done, yada, yada. But Italy's notoriously ungovernable, and most Italians aren't into the right-wing culture war, anti-LGTBQ stuff she's spouting, so my guess is her days are already numbered. By 2024, some left-wing coalition will be back in power.
Meloni is still going to have to form a coalition government, which in Italy almost always means an unstable government. Minority governments in parliamentary systems are always unstable.
Nods in Israeli, Korean, & Taiwanese.
Historic nod to the Weimar Republic.
She also has Jewish heritage.
An unwed mother in antibiblical cohabitation with her baby father ***AND*** a cryptojew?
Egad!
Kevin,
Like your take on inflation, I think you are prematurely optimistic. Yes, there are some good signs that the far right may be losing ground in many places they seemed to be gaining ground just a couple years ago, just as there are some signs inflation has crested and will come down no. But come on, these things are precarious right now. Here in the US Trumpism is not spent even if the orange turd is looking a little weaker. The UK has a dumb blond version of Thatcher leading the charge back to the 80s, Italy has a charismatic neo-fascist leading her country (for now) and lest we forget, Putin is still waging war on Ukraine. There's a ways to go before we can claim a change in direction.
The recent British prime ministers have not been all-stars, but none of them have been more than very moderately right wing.
Needless to say there are many reasons why voters change ideological allegiance, but there were two important ones in Australia's recent rejection of the right-wing coalition government. Firstly, it was plain incompetent. It simply failed to inspire confidence that it knew what it was doing, with frequent changes of personnel and bungled projects, most notably the decision to cancel the purchase of French submarines which has thrown the future of our navy into utter chaos, together with a confused rollout of COVID vaccines which saw the rules and eligibilities changing almost by the week.
The second factor was very interesting. While voters rejected the reactionaries, they didn't turn to Labor, which only just managed to win a majority in the lower house and will need the support of the Green Party in the Senate. Most of the swing votes went to Greens and independents, all of whom were perceived to be more in touch with issues - especially global warming - that were of most concern to voters.
I'm no expert on British politics, but it seems to me the loss of support for Conservatives there also reflects a widespread belief that they are simply incompetent; unable to fulfil the core functions required of government in a contemporary society. Would Labour be any better? If the answer is "No", it would create the ideal circumstances for the emergence of authoritarian tendencies. If neither party in a democracy can govern effectively, more and more people will conclude that it is necessary to abandon democracy.
Helps that the Australian Greens aren't a cat's paw of the Internet Research Agency, as in America, or myopic peaceniks stuck in 1973, like the German Greens that Joschka Fischer brought into coalition government in 1998.
I'm sure I won't be the first person to write this, but while Trump's star does seem to be fading, the fascist vein he tapped into in this country most definitely is not. In fact, I'd say we are in far worse shape now than we were in, say 2020. The only thing that will cause me to believe fascism is fading in this country is a GOP wipeout in 2022. I'm not expecting that, but that would be real proof that Kevin is correct.
Once again, fascists???? You institutional liberals are the dumbest shits.....
Putin on the ropes too. Bombing your own gas pipelines to scare the Europeans is a desperation move.
Reading these comments, which have a lot of good analysis, I'm struck by the endless tendency of the American Left to see only the dark side. Sure, things may be looking good, but we've always been disappointed before. Yeah, the right wing seems to be self-imploding, but they always win for this big laundry list of reasons. Okay fine, it's a step forward, but it's not everything we've always wanted.
It strikes me as a loser philosophy: to not even admit to the possibility of winning, or at least making progress. Sure, pessimism is more accurate than optimism. But pessimism has never inspired action, either.
That's not true. Pessimism of outcome can motivate to prepare for that outcome.
The issue is that republicans only ever destroy. Losing makes things worse but there's no guarantee winning will make it better and sometimes winning makes things worse more slowly. Besides Republicans have been trained by their media to be rage-a-holics.
IDK about calling Boris Johnson a far-right wacko. He was just one in a long string of Tories and possibly its most moderate.
Easily the most stylish and debonair.
In Japan, the recent assasination of former Prime Minister Abe is leading to a reckoning with the Moonies and the way they've wormed their way into Japan's political establishment.
The Moonies tried the same thing here in the US. They gained some traction with anti-communist conservatives in the 1980s, but eventually the cult's founder -- Sun Myung Moon -- was convicted of tax evasion and spent 11 months in prison. Since then, the Moonies have kept a low profile but they never really went away. They still own the Washington Times.
Where's SeaOrg when you need it?
Russian wingnut TV blathering gets drafted,
https://mobile.twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/1574944570785267712
Why can't the minorities go, why can't the perverts go . . .?
'Blatherer', he's a blatherer, who is blathering, --but autocorrect really doesn't like blatherer.
Things may be looking up in places, but damned if I see it here. Confederates, aided by an outdated political system, see a path to the Orbanization of the US. The American public is easily manipulated to fear inflation and black people more than the loss of democracy.
And then we have the spectacle of all that money necessary to win elections. My emailbox brimeth over with daily appeals for campaign cash. People, instead of thinking, need to be continually "influenced" by the most mindless campaign ads imaginable.
I will make my final campaign contributions in a few days, and then try to put the campaigns out of mind while I wait for the fickle public to weigh in on election day. At which time, I will be able to pass judgement on Kevin's doubtful optimism.
Nope. There is no inflation and black people fear themselves. Do you need a nostril grip.
Your mythical confederates are globalist con men. Do you get that???
I get that you are an insane racist who would have been right at home in Hitler's Germany. I've had more than enough of you.
"Far right" is a dialectical term. Nothing about Italy is Fascist now. Yes max, fascism is a left wing creation. It's only called "right wing" because social democrats were covering their asses. "Conservative revolution" and the Left Hegelian movement were one and the same. Proto communists on one end, proto fascists on the other. " Socialism " was a slang word.
As a Swede I must say that I don't agree with Kevin's laid-back view of the recent Swedish election. As a matter of fact, the far-right party the Sweden Democrats turned out to be the second largest party, after the Social Democrats. Theirs was the largest increase among the parties represented in Parliament compared to the last election.
This is truly scary. And actually, traditionally in Sweden the leader of the largest party in the coalition that gets the majority of votes would be the next Prime Minister, meaning that our next PM could now be the leader of the extremist party. Thankfully they are still controversial enough that this will not be the case, it will instead be the leader of the third largest party the Moderates. The Sweden Democrats also have no previous experience of governing (and, I suspect, would prefer to stay outside of the government so that they can continue to take no responsibility and just be populist). But the next government will still be very much dependent on the far-right party, and this only a year after the PM-to-be very publicly promised a well-known WWII concentration camp survivor to never, ever cooperate with them.
So, I think it was a very bad outcome in an election with about 85% voter participation. Democracy is more fragile than we like to think, and parties like the Sweden Democrats are a definite threat.
Whoa! One of them is back.
Can sturestuhl be far behind?
Is this the best you can do, on a matter as serious as this?
When DeSantis wins the US presidential election in 2024, the pendulum will swing back to right ascendancy. Still, the American wars against Russia and China will continue.
Kevin is counting unhatched chickens. Bolsonaro has not lost yet: https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/03/jair-bolsonaro-brazil-election-strong-performance
Comments here will probably be closed before the runoff takes place.