Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his challenger, Geraldo Alckmin
Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! Singapore

Today is election day in Brazil, and for 126 million Brazilians, time to decide who their next president and congressional representatives will be. Via the Washington Post, AP has a good primer on the nuts and bolts of how Brazil’s elections work in this post here.

According to Arthur Ituassu, of Brazzil magazine:

They will be choosing their president and vice-president, twenty-seven governors, senators and state assemblies, as well as 513 federal deputies.

What should be a party for one of the biggest democracies in the world, ruled by a military regime until 1985, will instead be tinged with sadness.

Brasilians cast their ballots in a favela called Rocinha, near Rio de Janeiro
Source: Sergio Moraes of Reuters, via Yahoo! Brasil

Brazilians vote in Rio de Janeiro
Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! News

Leading the polls, at least until yesterday, is incumbent President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who’s an authentic man of the people, a laborer and a man rose through the Workers’ Party ranks through his own talents, chiefly in the ability to mediate and compromise. But his party has been plagued with scandals, huge scandals, one scandal after another, including a real big one involving cash and the electoral board at the last minute, and that seems to be having an impact on his prospects, contrary to conventional wisdom. He should have been a shoe-in and he’s not. Voters have got to be disappointed with him for the robust corruption that still reigns in Brazil.

Lula’s party was supposed to be outside all that, with its very leftist “people’s representative” roots and status as a political outsider. Turns out they were more corrupt than their predecessors and the scandals are at last licking at their leader, Lula.

Perhaps for that reason, Lula declined at the last minute to show up at the last presidential debate. Randy Paul has a telling photo of that, here. With a hat tip to Global Voices, Colin Brayton at NMM Business Continuity has Lula’s translated letter of that refusal to participate here.

How bad was it? Well, Francesco Neves, writing in Brazzil magazine, got this story from an electoral official whose office phones were bugged:

The president of Brazil’s National Election Board (TSE), minister Marco Aur????lio Mello, is mad as hell after finding out that his telephone as well as those of two other ministers who work with him were bugged.

“This is worrisome and shows the situation we are living in,” said Mello, adding that such behavior was deplorable. “We have an almost psychedelic situation with scandals bursting forth day in and day out. When we think everything has already happened something else comes up and we are left perplexed”

The rest can be read here.

Nevertheless, the broad picture shows that Lula’s essentially kept most of his best campaign promises, like not spending the country into the ground or defaulting on the sovereign debt, and doing things for the poor, like paying them to go to school. For those essential reasons, he could win a second term as a vote of confidence. But it might be a second-round victory, if in this round, he gets less than 50% – which is looking increasingly likely.

The last poll before the election showed Lula with just 45% of the vote.

Voting is compulsory and getting called to be a poll worker is like jury duty. These guys in clown noses are protesting having to be poll workers without pay, giving up their entire day. … “Aw, mann, Beavis, do we really have to do this all day?”
Source: AFP, via Getty Images

A friend in Belo Horizonte writes me:

Lula is really amazing, and very clever. He entirely lacks culture, but has plenty common sense.

The problem is that the core of his party apparatus is very rotten.

I expect Lula to be re-elected thanks to the votes of the poor who really were favored by increased (but still moderate) monthly cash handouts, but I expect Lula’s party to win almost nowhere, except in two or three marginal small states.

If he gets a small plurality, he remains exposed to post-election legal troubles.

According to the new legislation, in fact, it’s the candidate himself who is legally responsible for campaign finance, and illegal unreported large contributions can determine ejection from office by court decision.

He suffered a big scandal a year ago, which led to the resignation of his prime minister, the president of his party, the secretary general of his party, the treasurer of his party and the finance minister (now indicted).

The new scandal that blew up two weeks ago Äabout the bugging and cash – blogger Luis Assumpcao has covered this well, too here and Global Voices has a good scandal roundup hereÅ led to the resignation of the chairman of his campaign committee, the man in charge of intelligence, a director of Banco Do Brasil, a former undersecretary of state, a personal assistant of the President himself and a few party (officials, all now indicted) – they all conspired to buy doctored information from a convict, trying to blame the former administration for bribes that actually went to MPs of the current administration.

They were caught red-handed by the police with almost a million dollars in cash (to pay the informer) and are unable to explain the origin of such funds.

In a way, it’s comforting, because it shows that the police are not entirely controlled by the government.

Lula put on a brave face, sacked his aides, called them “a gang of crazies” and claimed ignorance of the plot.

One might believe he was not behind the plot personally (because it was a bad idea in the first place) but then one must conclude the man is unable to exclude rogues when choosing his key aides.

A friend’s daughter anyway told me: Nobody in my school is supporting Lula because he is a big stealer.

Lula after he cast his ballot near Sao Paulo this morning
Source: Rickey Rogers, via Yahoo! Brasil

>Lula’s opponent, Gerald Alckmin, has put up a good fight. He’s an ex-governor of Sao Paulo state, a well-run state that’s the glittering financial capital of South America. He’s running on a more free market platform, but he’s more of a centrist than a libertarian. He actually led in the polls a few months back but his campaign faltered from it because it was the seat of some of the worst prison-thug rioting in recent memory, some of which has been blamed on his weakness in the face of thugs. Apparently he’s since regained his lost momentum in the wake of the Lula scandal, which makes this horserace interesting.

Alckmin casts his ballot in Sao Paulo
Source: AP, via Yahoo! News

As a center-right guy, Alckmin knows well that Brazil has slid a few places on the world competitiveness rankings, something that has happened on Lula’s watch. With Mexico eating Brazil’s lunch in competitiveness, he might be just the right thing for the ‘faster please’ Brazilians. Can he beat Lula? Conventional wisdom says no, but Brazil has been known to bring surprises at election time.

What’s most likely is that a rightwing Congress will come in, but Lula, who’s popular as a person, will in the end retain his office.

What may happen could be roughly similar to the Clinton second term of office in the U.S., where the popular engaging Bill Clinton easily won a second term in office in 1996, but also got a huge landslide of rightwing legislators led by Newt Gingrich to deal with, ensuring that he never ever tried to take over one-tenth of the American economy as he did in his bid to nationalize health care. The ultimate result of that setup was one of the most successful peacetime governments in U.S. history. Tax cuts were enacted, welfare handouts were limited and reformed, and the budget was balanced. And the stock market rose to record highs, leaving Alan Greenspan fuming. Those were the days!

But the Clinton-Gingrich team was also notoriously lousy on security, as Bin Laden well knew, though. Why do I bring this up? Because if he’s reelected, Lula will face unprecedented security challenges in his second term as Hugo Chavez attempts to dominate the hemisphere in the name of his ‘Boliviarian’ project, which is nothing more than a completion of Fidel Castro’s efforts to throw Cuban-style communism over South America. Would Brazil put up with that? One wants to say ‘no’ but the uncomfortable fact is, they are, because Lula has allowed Chavez to run circles around him, vastly reducing Brazil’s influence in the region.

Right now Evo Morales of Bolivia is constructing military bases on the Brazilian border. Chavez is sending troops to the region, and a dangerous Bolivian civil war is brewing. Castro is dying and Chavez is getting ready to assume Castro’s aggressive new mantle, pursuing nuclear alliances with Iran and Argentina. There is no question that Brazil has some serious security challenges in coming years.

But like Clinton, Lula is deeply reluctant to get involved in war matters. He may be pushed by his military, which knows the deal, or Alan Garcia of Peru, who sees clearly what is happening, but thus far, he has always resisted confrontation in favor of appeasement to predators like Chavez and Morales. Will he continue to do so? Hard to say. But it’s going to be harder and harder for him to stay on the fence. See Fausta’s take on this struggle for regional dominance here.

Brazil has a blazing bright economic future ahead of it, a land of innovations, industry, cutting edge technology and improving education. His reluctance to confront thugs may be a bid to preserve this prosperity. Maybe it will take a blow to Brazil’s economy to rouse Lula.

So now the elections are on.

One other odd factor that could affect debate if not turnout is that Brazilians are being distracted by a lot of other news, too – a sex video with a Merrill Lynch banker and an MTV hostess who’s a Ronaldo ex (If you absolutely must see it, it’s here) is one.

The other is a major airline crash deep in the Amazon after a brand new pride-of-Brazil GOL airline flight had a freak mid-air collision with a small plane, going down into impenetrable jungle. The crash, with 155 believed dead, is the worst in Brazil’s history, and supposedly important people and foreigners were among the casualties.

But the World Cup did not distract Mexicans from taking their electoral vote seriously as it overlapped the event and neither will these news events in Brazil, if you ask me.

Let’s see how this goes as one of the world’s biggest democracies goes to the polls.

I’ll add updates through the day.

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BLOG ROUNDUP

Ucho Info is live blogging from Brazil and has various local results and insights as they are coming in. It’s all in Portuguese, here.

Luis Afonso Assumpcao at Swimming Against The Red Tide in Porto Alegre has not got anything up yet, but probably will soon, so keep an eye on his blog – which he does in English.

Boz at Bloggings by Boz has the final poll numbers for Lula and Alckmin ahead of the vote, with various polls showing Lula ahead, but not by a vast margin. The polls can be read here.

My old friend from our Indonesia/Japan days, Julie McCarthy, is blogging at NPR on Brazil – she doesn’t have much yet, but is likely to be updating, here.

Amilcar at No Leaky Buckets has a great rundown of the history of Brazil’s elections, explaining the highly electronicized nature of Brazil’s voting and other important details. Read it here.

UPDATE: Boz at Bloggings by Boz has five observations about Brazil’s election, all of which I pretty much agree with. He thinks the media made too much of the political scandals, and other things, like crime and the economy were important. I especially agree with him on the economy and I know in July the crime issue was real serious – Lula was like the David Dinkins of Brazil, unwilling to crack the whip on thugs, ensuring that they multiplied. Read the whole thing from Boz here.

UPDATE: Randy Paul at Beautiful Horizons, who has a lot of Brazil experience, has several observations well worth reading about how undecided voters seemed to go to Alckmin – read it here.

UPDATE: Ricardo at Ricardo’s blog has an excellent election summary, and the outlook for the next few weeks, in this good post here.

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Results

The Tribunal Superior Eleitoral, Brazil’s supreme election authority, is putting out its results here.

O Globo reports that with 66% of the ballots counted, a second round is a near certitude in Brazil. The current score? Lula 48.76%, Alckmin 41.43% – See O Globo’s chart of results as they come in here.

UPDATE: The TSE now says the score is Lula 49.39%, Alckmin 40.88% – Lula may yet pull through. 74.44% of the votes have been counted – with very few spoiled or blank ballots. Read it here.

UPDATE: The TSE now says Lula’s making gains as Alckmin loses steam. But it’s very close. With 82.93% of the vote in, it’s Lula 49.56% and Alckmin 40.67%. See it here.

UPDATE: Just out – the TSE has 92% of the ballots counted, Alckmin is pulling ahead by a couple of millimeters and Lula is losing ground. This race could go any way now. The score: Lula – 49.34%, Alckmin 40.79% – keep watching this here.

UPDATE: This result is moving quickly, and Lula is losing further ground. With 94.37% turnout, Lula is pulling in 49.09% and Alckmin is pulling 41.09%, according to these TSE results here.

UPDATE: Decisive shift! With 97.8% of the votes tallied, Lula now has dropped to 48.79% and Alckmin has edged up slightly to 41.43% of the vote. There’s likely to be a runoff! See TSE for yourself here.

UPDATE: It’s a wrap! Lula cannot break the 50% mark even if he takes every single one of the remaining vote. With 99.13% of the vote counted, Lula’s got 48.65% and Alckmin’s got 41.58%. Brazil’s voters have sent a message tonight – Lula, we love you, but not quite the way we used to! You’ve got to change! Read the whole thing from the TSE electoral board here.

UPDATE: Reuters has an excellent wrap of the Brazil election here.

UPDATE: Fausta’s got some razor-sharp insights on this election’s aftermath, in this brilliant short post here.

UPDATE: Brazil’s market is going hog-wild on this election result. They like the idea of a Clinton-Gingrich congress – after all, think what it did for the stock market in the U.S.? Reuters has it here.

UPDATE: Alckmin’s Web site shows that the Alckmin team is exuberant and energized and ready to fight Lula. See it here.

Post continues here.