And Its Headed to a Runoff

So, what we now know to be the first round of Presidential elections were held in Brazil, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wins vote but not an outright majority, so this heads to a runoff.

While the exact percentages are not certain it appears that da Silva got 5% more of the vote than the clearly fascist Bolsonaro.

The runoff will be held on October 30, and while the 48%/43% split in this round indicates that da Silva is likely to win that, I would expect an explosion of election related violence from the right wing, and a possible coup attempt to influence the election, so the outcome is by no means certain:

Brazil’s acrimonious presidential race will go to a second round after the former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva failed to secure the overall majority he needed to avoid a run-off with the far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro.

With more than 99.5% of votes counted the leftist veteran had secured 48.3% of the vote, not enough to avoid the 30 October show down with his right-wing rival. Bolsonaro, who significantly out-performed pollsters’s predictions and will be buoyed by the result, received 43.3%.

………

But the election result was a major blow to progresssive Brazilians who had been rooting for an emphatic victory over Bolsonaro, a former army captain who has repeatedly attacked the country’s democratic institutions and vandalized Brazil’s international reputation.

Bolsonaro is also accused of wreaking havoc on the environment and catastrophically mishandling a Covid epidemic that killed nearly 700,000 Brazilians, by undermining vaccination and containment efforts and peddling quack cures.

I am not sure if the military will attempt a coup to keep Bolsonaro in power, but there are elements of the military who will raise the possibility of a coup to keep Bolosonaro in power, particularly if the right wing violence escalates to military allied death squads over the next months, which is distinctly possible.