Lula By A Light Year – Brazil’s Lula landslides to reelection
Source: AFP, via Yahoo! News

Brazil’s incumbent President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva has cruised on to an easy victory in Brazil’s runoff election. He’s got more votes than he did last time and the total ballots aren’t even fully counted. With 94% of the tally counted, the final score was 61-39, a very strong showing.

See for yourself at Brazil’s official election site here.

Randy Paul at Beautiful Horizons has some excellent analysis, along with some translations from the Brazilian local press about why this has happened. It looks like Lula did a good enough job while the attack-tactics of his political opponent, Gerardo Alckmin, seem to have backfired with voters. Alckmin went after Lula on corruption, which was negative and had some trouble getting his more positive message out on free markets. For one thing, he said he was going to cut taxes but did not specify which government programs he would cut. He seemed to be unable to explain that lower taxes combined with higher growth means more taxes in the coffers and fewer government programs to cut. But since people believed that any tax cut would have to be “paid for” by cuts to bureaucratic programs, it is a clear-cut case of not getting the message out or not getting it out believably.

Randy quotes some people as saying that the government has way to great a hand in some banks and in the state oil company, but I would like to add my own take on that – I think that’s wrong because the government has done a pretty good job of turning the banks and the oil company into world-class firms that can compete on a global level, even as state companies. I don’t see them as bureaucratic sinecures, they’re real companies. I actually researched this this past week.

In fact, I get the feeling that the fact that Brazil’s seeing the best growth it’s seen in years and the absence of a crisis might very well be the reason why sensible Brazilians reelected Lula. If all the other leaders you elected gave you whipsaw gutwrenching rollercoastering economic crises and this one didn’t … wouldn’t you want to leave good enough alone?

Blog & Op-Ed Roundup

Boz at Bloggings by Boz writes an excellent analysis explaining that the overall development is positive for Brazil and even factors that might be negatives in other countries, such as a split congress, might just be helpful for Lula. It’s a pleasant read here.

Andres Oppenheimer at Miami Herald has an interesting take on this election too – he says the sheer normalcy of the election and the relative lack of mudslinging and tocsin-crying is probably a good sign for Brazil’s democracy, which, though it is growing slowly, is moving in just the right direction. His good essay is well worth reading here.

UPDATE: O.K., now here’s one I have been waiting for! Luis Afonso at Swimming Against the Red Tide, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, a blogger who has no sympathy for Lula, debunks considerable myths around the Brazil election, some of which have been spread by me. It’s a good antidote to conventional wisdom and is well-argued. Read the whole thing here.

UPDATE: Elsewhere on the South American continent, Daniel Duquenal at Venezuela News & Views writes that Lula’s strong reelection is unbelievably bad news for Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, who currently is thrashing to survive the coming December election. Chavez has quit cavorting with Lula over in Rio and Lula is fed up with the Venezuelan dictator wannabe. Man, this is good analysis! It’s a big must-read here!

UPDATE: Fausta at Fausta’s Blog has more thoughts on this, with links to other blogs that discuss the security questions that Lula is ignoring. Read it here.

UPDATE: Orrin Judd at The Brothers Judd – who always eerily thinks just like I do – says that if both of Brazil’s candidates govern like rightwingers even though one says he is left and one says he is right, what’s the problem. He thinks that if they keep this up, they’re going to end up with a Security Council seat. I totally agree – the excellent post is here.

UPDATE: Chris McGowan has a fascinating long post at Huffington Post, realistically describing how it must have looked to Brazilians, from his own left-leaning point of view. He points out that Brazil’s election was refreshingly fair, and explores the intriguing fact that the whole thing was done electronically. It’s good reading here.

UPDATE: Michael Stickings of The Moderate Voice has an item that mulls Lula’s wide margin of victory, with the atomized party situation in the congress, making coalition-building imperative. He has lots of links too, read it all on this post here.

UPDATE: Political scientist and elections expert Matthew Shugart at Fruits and Votes has more analysis of how it went, noting that this is the first case he’s seen where the challenger did worse in the second round than in the first. He wonders if there are others. It’s an interesting question, in this post here.

UPDATE: IBD has a new one just out, says that Lula deserved his victory, given his strong economic showing. All that totally superseded any of the problems during his administration like corruption. If you were Brazilian, the guy was likely good for you, or at least didn’t hurt you too much like some of his predecessors. Read it here.

UPDATE: Oppenheimer has another new one just out (he is filing from Sao Paulo), where he quotes Brazilian leaders who think Lula is likely to be a strong president. Oppenheimer however outlines some of the challenges Lula will face – and there are a lot of them. How he handles the economy will be key to his presidency’s success or failure. It’s good reading, either here or here.

UPDATE: Washington Post has an elegant and realistic essay on why Lula succeeded in a lead editorial here.

Hat tip: Real Clear Politics

UPDATE: Michael Barone at his U.S. News & World Report blog brings up several obvious and excellent points in what is the best analysis so far of what happened in Brazil’s election – he explains out the Heloisa Helena vote, the north-south divide and Lula’s personal popularity. His analysis is better and fresher than anyone else’s – it’s kickass. Read the whole thing here.