Live Commentary
11:28am With virtually all votes counted, Lula wins by 50.9-49.1, a 1.8% margin. Brazilian polls slightly overstated Lula in the runoff, but were much better than in the first round. That first round gave them an opportunity to adjust their sampling to include more Bolsonaro voters.
10:16am With 99.4% reporting, Lula leads by 50.87-49.13, a 1.7% margin. That’s down from the 5.2% margin he won the first round by. In 2018, Bolsonaro won the runoff by a 55.1-44.9 margin.
9:17am With 92% reporting, Lula is winning by 50.6-49.4. Not as much movement to Lula in late counting as there was in the first round.
8:47am Lula has just overtaken Bolsonaro in the live count with 68% in, and will win from here. Projection: Lula has defeated Bolsonaro, and will be Brazil’s next president.
8:38am I believe Lula may be outperforming his first round margins in his own strongholds, while Bolsonaro does well in his. Gap now down to just 50.1-49.9 with 60% reporting.
8:29am Bolsonaro’s lead down to just 50.3-49.7 as nearly 50% have reported.
8:21am With 42% of the overall vote counted, Bolsonaro leads by 50.6-49.4. It took until 46% were counted last time for Bolsonaro’s lead to fall to 2.2%.
8:17am In 2018, Brazil’s most populous states of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro both gave Bolsonaro 68-32 margins in the runoff. He’s not getting anywhere near that margin this time in either state.
8:12am With 34% in, Bolsonaro’s margin continues to narrow to under two points, 50.9-49.1.
7:58am With 24% counted, Bolsonaro leads by 51.3-48.7. He was further ahead at the same stage in the first round count, according to my live blog. In the first round, it took until 70% had been counted for Lula to overtake Bolsonaro.
7:50am With 18.5% counted, Bolsonaro leads by 51.6-48.4. I believe the current results point to a narrow Lula win when all votes are counted.
7:38am Bolsonaro’s overall lead has narrowed to 52.0-48.0 as 11% have reported.
7:34am With 58% counted in Tocantins, Lula is winning there by 52.5-47.5. In the first round, Lula won Tocantins by 6.4%.
7:28am With 4.4% of overall districts counted, Bolsonaro leads by 53.9-46.1. Early results will very likely be skewed to Bolsonaro.
7:23am 58% now counted in the federal district, and Bolsonaro’s lead reduced to about 59.2-40.8.
7:19am With 24% counted already in the federal district, Bolsonaro is leading there by almost 60-40. In the first round, he won this district by almost 15 points. In the 2018 runoff, he won by 70-30.
7:07am Monday Here is the Guardian’s live results for the runoff. Past elections it would be useful to track results against are the 2022 first round results and the 2018 runoff results by state.
7:48pm In the first round of the Brazilian election, early results were skewed towards Bolsonaro, as his strong areas counted faster than Lula’s. That’s likely to be the case again tomorrow morning.
Guest post by Adrian Beaumont, who joins us from time to time to provide commentary on elections internationally. Adrian is a paid election analyst for The Conversation. His work for The Conversation can be found here, and his own website is here.
At the October 2 first round of the Brazilian presidential election, the leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) led the far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro by a 48.4-43.2 margin. As nobody won over 50%, the contest goes to a runoff today. Lula was president from 2003 to 2010.
Brazil has four time zones, but voting hours are synchronised, so that polls in trailing time zones open and close an hour earlier local time than polls in leading time zones. All polls close at 7am Monday AEDT. As votes are recorded electronically, counting should be fast. There is no pre-poll or postal voting; all votes must be cast on Election Day. Voting is compulsory for those aged between 18 and 70.
Polls for the runoff have narrowed to include more Bolsonaro voters after they understated his first round support. The final six polls, which mostly include some fieldwork conducted after Friday’s debate, gave Lula a one to seven point lead. However, there were two Bolsonaro leads in polls conducted last week.
Even if Lula wins, the legislature is likely to be difficult for him. In my live blog of the first round election, I wrote that right-wing parties won a majority in both chambers of the legislature. Bolsonaro’s Liberal party performed particularly well.
In the last three years, left-wing candidates have won presidential elections in Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Bolivia and Peru. A win in Brazil would cement the left’s dominance in South America even as they struggle in Europe.
Israel: Netanyahu’s bloc ahead and could win a majority
The Israeli election will be held Tuesday, after a government formed to keep out former PM Benjamin Netanyahu collapsed in June. The 120 members of the Knesset are elected by national proportional representation with a 3.25% threshold. A majority requires 61 seats.
Right-wing parties that are likely to support Netanyahu are his own Likud, the religious Shas and UTJ, and the far-right Religious Zionists. The final allowed polls were published by Friday; they give these right-wing parties a combined 60-62 Knesset seats, while the current governing parties have 54-56 seats. An Arab party that is not part of the government has the remaining four seats.
Two Arab parties – Hadash-Ta’al and Ra’am – are consistently shown as winning four seats, meaning they are just above the 3.25% threshold. If either were to drop below this threshold, they would win no seats and Netanyahu’s bloc would be advantaged and win a majority.
US, UK and Danish polls
I wrote last Monday that Republicans have gained in the polls for the US November 8 midterm elections. Since that article, the FiveThirtyEight forecasts for the House and Senate have stabilised. Democrats now have a 52% chance to hold the Senate (55% last Monday), while Republicans have an 81% chance to gain the House (80% previously).
Rishi Sunak became Britain’s new PM last Tuesday. Polls conducted since then have shown the Conservatives improving markedly from the final polls of Liz Truss, but Labour still holds a massive lead. In six of the seven polls taken since Sunak became PM, Labour led by 24 to 32 points, down from the 27 to 39 point lead in Truss’ final days. The Conservative-leaning Opinium poll gave Labour a 16-point lead, down from 27.
The Danish election will be held Tuesday. All 179 seats are elected by proportional representation with a 2% threshold. The Social Democrats have governed since the left-aligned “Red Bloc” of parties won the June 2019 election. Polls have the Red Bloc leading the Blue Bloc by five to ten points.
Brazil: All the best to Lula. A Social Democratic win in Brazil could become an international game changer.
USA midterm elections: If I had to choose, as a supporter of the Democratic party, I would prefer to control the Senate, even if I lose the control of the H. of Reps.. Whatever the Reps decide (e.g. a demented impeachment attempt against Biden), it will be killed in the Senate…. and the Republicans know it. But in any event, I can’t wait to see how those elections pan out, a great deal is at stake there and not only for the USA.
Indeed the Democrats need to maintain control of the Senate if only to allow them to process Biden’s nominees to various roles including the federal judiciary.
It will be hard for them but the missteps of the GOP with some of their candidates will hopefully help them.
As to a GOP controlled House trying to impeach Biden it keeps the base happy but Kevin McCarthy appears cool on it. He’d rather spend the time passing legislation rather than have lots of investigations going on – that’s if he can help the right wing on board. They’ve already basically said they won’t vote for anything they don’t approve of even down to funding the government!
Israel needs to have a serious look at its election system. The PR model has led to fringe ratbags having a say on who is PM, way beyond their numerical support.
What is it, the fifth election in 4 years? Just divide the country into 120 by the latest census, and have an electoral system which provides a level of certainty.
Just wondering, does Jamie Packer get a vote?
Thank you – will be watching.
This guy is the Israeli BillBo…
https://knessetjeremy.com/category/knesset/polls/
Haaretz is a left-leaning media outlet in Israel… they are basically saying the small vanity outfits should leave the playing field….
The alarming rise in support for Kahanism and the entrenchment of Benjamin Netanyahu and his loyalists on the summit of an imaginary Masada, where everything precious, fair and reasonable that Israeli democracy has laboriously built over more than seven decades is the object of ridicule and destruction, make Tuesday’s election critical. This is a battle that will determine the fate of the State of Israel: to the benevolent Israeliness that looks toward the future, or to the tribe of Jewish fundamentalism.
The picture that emerges from the latest polls gives little hope for those who fear Netanyahu’s return to power and the opening shot of “the time of Itamar Ben-Gvir.” According to the data, the best the “change bloc” can hope for is a political draw, which, while blocking the Netanyahu bloc from returning to power, will leave Yair Lapid in the position of caretaker prime minister until after yet another election, which would be the sixth in about four years. This is an extremely problematic scenario, but it is infinitely preferable to the horror-show scenario of a Netanyahu-Ben-Gvir government.
Against this backdrop, the presence of parties that are not supported by even 1 percent of Israelis, and their insistence on staying in the game until the end, even at the cost of precious votes going to waste, is irresponsible. There are several such parties. A Channel 12 News poll from Friday gives 0.9 percent of the vote to Yaron Zelekha’s New Economic Party; 0.6 percent each to Hadar Muchtar’s Tzeirim Boarim, Abir Kara’s Hofesh Calcali and Ale Yarok; and 0.4 percent to Eli Avidar’s Israel Hofsheet.
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2022-10-30/ty-article/quit-now/00000184-2537-ddff-a586-ff3790530000
That’s the most interesting claim of vote-wasting I’ve ever seen. Of course, threshold-based PR deliberately decides that some voters should be ignored and FPTP/districted PR recklessly agree. But to see it claimed that the election result might be skewed by precious votes going to tiny parties even in the simplest national PR/no threshold system is incredible.
Here are the last 2 weeks of Brazilian presidential polling.
Date; sample; Bolsonaro %; Lula%; undecided; margin in favour of Lula
Some polls repeated with little change (e.g. Datafolha + 4/5% to Lula and Ipec + 7%)
Datafolha[226] 28–29 Oct 2022 8,308 45% 49% 7% 4%
Genial/Quaest[227] 27–29 Oct 2022 2,000 42% 45% 13% 3%
Ipec[228] 27–29 Oct 2022 4,272 43% 50% 7% 7%
Atlas[229] 26–29 Oct 2022 7,500 45.7% 52.4% 1.9% 6.7%
CNT/MDA[230] 26–28 Oct 2022 2,002 44.9% 46.9% 8.2% 2%
Paraná Pesquisas[231] 26–28 Oct 2022 2,400 46.3% 47.1% 6.6% 0.8%
28 Oct 2022 Fourth presidential debate.
Datafolha[232] 25–27 Oct 2022 4,580 44% 49% 7% 5%
ModalMais/Futura[233] 24–26 Oct 2022 2,000 47.2% 46.6% 6.1% 0.6%
Gerp[234] 21–26 Oct 2022 2,095 47% 43% 9% 4%
PoderData[235] 23–25 Oct 2022 5,000 44% 49% 7% 5%
Genial/Quaest[236] 23–25 Oct 2022 2,000 42% 48% 10% 6%
Abrapel/Ipespe[237] 22–24 Oct 2022 1,100 44% 50% 6% 6%
Ipec[238] 22–24 Oct 2022 3,008 43% 50% 7% 7%
Paraná Pesquisas[239] 20–24 Oct 2022 2,020 45.9% 46.3% 7.8% 0.4%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2022_Brazilian_presidential_election#Second_round
“Lula will probably win”
How can you say this with such confidence? The polls have narrowed and are within the margin of error. No it is not over an incumbent presidents very rarely lose reelection and even the ones that have their losses were questionable.
sprocket_ says:
Sunday, October 30, 2022 at 7:11 pm
Israel needs to have a serious look at its election system. The PR model has led to fringe ratbags having a say on who is PM, way beyond their numerical support.
What is it, the fifth election in 4 years? Just divide the country into 120 by the latest census, and have an electoral system which provides a level of certainty.
Just wondering, does Jamie Packer get a vote?
=====================
Although you’re right about the election system giving disproportionate power to smaller parties, the current problem is not the system, It’s Netanyahu. Since the assassination of Rabin the electorate has moved very much to the right. If Netanyahu was out of the way then National Unity and Yisrael Beitenu, which are genuine RW parties, would be part of any RW coalition. Yesh Atid, which is centre-right (only differing from Likud on some social issues but virtually identical on security and economic matters) would also likely to be a part of such a coalition. Lapid has said numerous times that he would be very happy to form a coalition with Likud if it wasn’t led by Netanyahu.
The only parties excluded from such a coalition would be Labor, Meretz, Hadash-Taal and Ra’am (and three of those would happily join if allowed), so the current polls (which of course would change significantly if Netanyahu wasn’t running, e.g. National Unity would probably disappear and a majority of its voters would vote for Likud, while some would vote for Labor or Yesh Atid) indicate that there would be 100+ seats in such a RW coalition, under the current election system, if Netanyahu was out of the way.
As to the actual result this time, it seems that Netanyahu is very close to a majority, although a friend of mine who now lives over there and is heavily involved in organising Yesh Atid’s election day ground game reckons that it is currently far superior to Likud’s ground game and may be worth a seat or two on election day, which may be enough to stop Netanyahu’s bloc from getting to 61, if all four of Labor, Meretz, Hadash-Taal and Ra’am end up above the threshold and Bayit Yehudi doesn‘t, as, if above the threshold, it would join the Netanyahu bloc and give it 61+.
On Israeli ‘democracy’
“Israel’s election on Tuesday is not a general election, and therefore not a democratic one. Apartheid South Africa had exactly the same deception: the regime was defined as a parliamentary democracy and later as a presidential democracy. Elections were held in adherence with the law, with the National and Afrikaner parties forming a coalition. Only one thing separated South Africa from democracy – elections were meant for whites only.”
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2022-10-30/ty-article-opinion/were-all-dressing-up-as-democrats/00000184-2513-d083-afdd-bd9fed540000
First votes are in – Brazil
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-brazil-election/
So, given Lula now has the ascendency, how long until bolsanaro “trumps” the result and declares it rigged? Troubled times ahead and we have the rednecks from the US to thank for it.
That garbage is creeping in here too.
Bye bye Bolsy.
Mabwn – By about noon ESDT. I can’t see him accepting a result with a margin smaller than 5% without complaining. The question is what that means – does it mean violence? A coup? A court challenge? Or just attempts hold mass rallies?
If the result is within this margin, Bolsanaro may well want the voting machines checked
Blank votes
1,613,723
—
Null votes
3,586,882
Very tight and closer than the previous round. Although the outcome is as expected, the margin may be cause for trouble.
I doubt it is in Bolsonaro’s style to accept defeat graciously. I wonder what he will steal/destroy/try to keep on the way out?
It seems there was some trouble with roadblocks in parts of Brazil stopping or delaying buses carrying voters.
It seems this ploy (which would favour Bolsonaro) was attempted but failed.
https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/latin-america/brazilian-election-hit-by-outcry-over-roadblocks.phtml
Latest – Lula now on 50.8% with 98.2% counted
I am wondering why most of Bolsonaro’s support comes from the big cities of Sao Paulo and Rio while Lula gets most of his votes from the regions. One would think that far right candidates get the overwhelming bulk of their votes from regional and rural areas. This appears to be true in every other democracy.
MelbourneMammoth says:
Monday, October 31, 2022 at 9:47 am
“I am wondering why most of Bolsonaro’s support comes from the big cities of Sao Paulo and Rio while Lula gets most of his votes from the regions”
Reporting is by state (not city) and the states of Sao Paulo and Rio have rural populations.
There is also a regional trend with the north favouring Lula and the south Bolsonaro. Unsure why this is but it might be race related. Northern Brazil has a greater proportion of darker skinned people.
MelbourneMammoth – well, in the West the “rural right wing, urban left wing” thing is partly a matter of social (often religious) conservatism vs secular liberal values.
In Brazil the left right divide is still very much about the poor vs the wealthy, socialist people’s party vs authoritarian capitalism, the much more traditional definitions of left and right. Lula is supported by the poorer areas of Brazil and Bolsonaro by the wealthier areas (not saying by everybody in Rio or Sao Paolo, far from it, but by a majority yes).
On the guardian blog…
The mood is a little different in Rio de Janeiro, where, journalist Constant Mallaret reports, Bolsonaro’s supporters gathered outside the president’s home in the western neighbourhood of Barra da Tijuca to watch the vote count, clad in yellow football shirts and waving the Brazilian flag – symbols which have become synonymous with the president’s nationalist movement.
Their high spirits fell as Lula pulled ahead, with pro-Bolsonaro jingles and firecrackers giving way to Evangelical songs and prayers.
“I’m angry,” said Monique Almeido, a 36-year-old beautician, as Lula’s victory looked inevitable. “We’re demotivated, I don’t even know what to say.”
“It’s fraud without a doubt, they manipulated the count. The Armed Forces must intervene,” said João Reis, a 50-year-old electrician. And if they don’t? “The population must take to the streets to demand military intervention so that we don’t hand power over to the communists.”
From atop a sound truck, a man draped in the Israeli flag, another symbol often used by Evangelical Bolsonaro supporters, and who identified himself as Felipe Pitanga, aggressively echoed such calls to reject the results. But most supporters were heading home resigned. “He is not leaving! I do not accept [Bolsonaro’s defeat]!” the man chanted to the rapidly dwindling crowd.
Basically the cities are richer and the rural poor are much more numerous than the richer landowners in the rural areas. Before mechanisation in agricultural, this used to be the case in Australia too.
Daniel at 2.16 am
Comment from the Guardian blog:
“Long-time Brazil correspondent Andrew Downie points out that, as Lula looks likely to have won the election, the other historical note is that Jair Bolsonaro becomes the first president since the 1990s to be voted out of office. Before him all presidents who attempted a second term were voted back in.
Fernando Henrique Cardoso in 1998, Lula himself in 2006 and Dilma Rousseff in 2014 all won a second four-year term. Bolsonaro is the first president to be rejected at the ballot box.”
Note that a significant majority of Brazil’s 700,000 dead from Covid would have voted for Lula if they had lived.
Dr Doolittle says:
Monday, October 31, 2022 at 10:30 am
…….
“Note that a significant majority of Brazil’s 700,000 dead from Covid would have voted for Lula if they had lived.”
No doubt Bolsonaro and crew will claim that they did vote.
Paul Tu at 10.40 am
The official Covid death toll in Brazil is just over 688,000 but the actual toll to the end of 2021 was around 800,000 according to health researchers. The likely death toll by now must be close to 1 million. The north and northeast of Brazil, strongholds for Lula, have been the worst affected regions.
There is a key difference between Brazilian voting and US presidential voting. All votes in Brazil must be made on the day. This limits the opportunities for doubting the officially declared result.
Bolsonaro has a long and dubious history of concoction and violence, but the speed of the result makes any efforts to doubt its legitimacy very difficult.
@Sprocket_:
Literally impossible, due to the very nature of PR systems. If a political party – even a “fringe” party – has seats in the Knesset, it is because that party has successfully attracted the support of a noticeable fraction of the Israeli populace. Indeed, it should be noted that the number of seats each party holds in the Knesset – and hence their “say” in who becomes PM – is explicitly and directly proportional to their level of popular support.
If “fringe ratbags” – by your definition of same – hold excessive influence, it’s because too many Israelis vote for them to be ignored. Unlike, for example, single-member electoral systems, whereby the only way to get elected is to kowtow to the factional numbers-men (almost invariably men…) who determine who gets chosen to carry the party’s name in each seat.
Matt, your position would be clear if the cabinet was elected proportionally by the parliament, as it is in Switzerland. In parliamentary democracies, where the government represents a majority of parliament, there are additional avenues for ratbaggery. In other words, the Swiss system is recursively proportional, but a parliamentary system with PR is one step proportional, the next step majoritarian. I suspect a Swiss-style cabinet is probably the solution for most of Israel’s problems, and that they will go for some other solution.
Also, your final paragraph is plainly false. Australia has had generations where independents could easily get elected, where indeed parties didn’t even exist. And we have seen that party preselection is not a prerequisite to election any more (for decades). The apparent dominance of parties in getting candidates elected is because people tend to report statistics only for a period where political, media and social elites genuinely believed in the good of a two-party system and deliberately sought to construct one. That time has passed, and things have changed almost as quickly. But whether or not you are willing to entertain that analysis, you must take back your clearly incorrect statement “the only way to get elected is to kowtow to the factional numbers-men” unless you intend to deny reality.
@Felix: How Parliament chooses the Cabinet is only marginally relevant. At the core of the matter, 5% of the votes = 5% of the seats = 5% of the say in how Government is formed. Having said that, a recursively proportional Cabinet-choosing system would be interesting – and probably an improvement.
As far as the two-party system is concerned, I am willing to partially withdraw my remarks – they were an exaggeration, not a fabrication. The fact remains that even today, at what is called the “nadir of two-party politics”, the two main parties (ALP/Coalition) received 67% of the votes – but 90% of the seats in the HoR. Historically, this is also the most ideologically-diverse House since at least 1937. About a third of seats are still so safe for one (or the other) major party that being nominated really is tantamount to election; less so than in previous eras, as shown by Kristina Kennealy’s misadventure, but the 2022 election was radically different from previous elections in that regard.
Bolsonaro has just made his first speech after the election and has not yet conceded.
Truckers have set up roadblocks across the country to protest the election result.
Hopefully this will blow over and a calm transition takes place.