Posted by laurenth 7 hours ago
The github link in the article does not work
This is into "not even wrong" territory. Brazil has a fairly close relationship with Russia, they're a fellow founding BRICS member - and Lula was president when it was formed. What would Putin get from having US (Trump) ally Bolsonaro Jr. over him?
And while it's great that the murder-happy fascist didn't win, it's not exactly a great win for democracy. It's just stopping the bleeding. Besides the obvious problem of being allied with Russia and China, Brazil has a worrying "anti fake news" law. Like elsewhere, it seems the slightly-better guys aren't eager to roll back power grabs that now benefit themselves.
It's not going to end until Lula literally drops dead. This country proved that today.
It can be better than the alternatives and still not good.
Even with Germany it turned out that Angela Merkel did grave mistakes and Germans were able to find out about those only after she left office. Being continually in office gives you the ability to hide your trials. The longer you stay the easier it is for you to get elected.
That’s why it is very important to have a time limit in power.
The extreme case which you want to avoid is "politicians" (dictators) desperately clinging to power, because they did things that would get them killed if they ever lost their power, which is a vicious cycle.
I like the swiss model more where one party never gets full power, even if it means societal changes take more time to happen[1], it seems less risky to me as there is never one power grab whose decision can influence the next election by stuff like redistricting, puting clearly leaning judges to federal court, etc.
[1] famous example is the women right to vote in the general election happened in 1971 which is quite shameful
If it was not clear, I am not stating that anyone who is in office is automatically the most competent. However, the entire point of a democracy is that you have the option to fire bad candidates. And yet, with term limits, when you do get a competent candidate in office, you do not have the option to keep them in office.
Being the chief executive in a system like brazil's results in a lot of power, for several perfectly good reasons, but it does mean you have to build in safe guards against that power growing.
Regular elections are good, but not sufficient, as a study of recent world history would demonstrate.
Term limits are not a solution either, as a study of recent world history would demonstrate. Clearly there is a need to check power, but perhaps the mechanisms that check power should not also ensure you will never have a truly excellent leader && increase instability from flipflopping policies && give more opportunities for people who will abuse power to take office and ignore the term limits because that's what people who abuse power do. A term limit is only effective against a mildly bad candidate who is not truly willing to abuse their power, because if they are willing to abuse their power they can just ignore it. In that way, you've created a system that caps upside but leaves downside uncapped in practice.
As stated, this is merely a truism, and you have not justified this belief. Would you care to? It seems very irrational to me. High office is one of the most difficult and most impactful jobs in the world. It's easy to do a terrible job and screw everyone over while enriching yourself, of course, but extremely challenging to do a good job. You are responsible for the fate of tens or hundreds of millions of people, and must exercise incredible judgment on the breadth of every macro problem society faces while simultaneously maneuvering both internal support and foreign relations. Why would we not want to make this most important of all jobs a job where people can actually grow into the role and demonstrate expertise in it? You are strictly only eliminating the electorate's options. There is already a corrective mechanism for voters to evict someone doing a bad job [whether they choose to exercise it is another matter, but that's literally democracy in action], but there should be no mechanism to sustain a job well done?
Also... too long in power makes it easier to dismantle the democratic process.
The entire American system of checks and balances is not designed to get optimal leadership, it is designed to limit damage from bad leadership.
Well how's that working out? There's a reason the rest of the developed democratic world hasn't adopted a strong executive.
Worked out very well for the American system till recently.
Then elect someone else next time. This, however, is a criticism of democracy more than it is a justification for term limits.
> The entire American system of checks and balances is not designed to get optimal leadership, it is designed to limit damage from bad leadership.
How's that working out for you? You got Trump and Biden as a direct result of term limits. The way I see it, your system has selected for the maximally damaging bad leadership possible.
The US only enacted term limits in 1951. Before that time, only two presidents had attempted to seek third terms (another two attempted but failed to secure even a nomination by a political party), and only one was successful.
And, quite frankly, the only president since the 22nd amendment who I could see wanting to run for a third term is Trump, who does seem to be campaigning for one anyways despite being constitutionally barred from it.
I really can’t understand how Brazilians (that actually have a multi party system) keep having to choose between two awful candidates.
I check my brake pads every year. Eventually the incumbent pads lose out to some whipper-snapper from the new pads box. I might vote red again or I might switch to blue. It depends how muddy it is. Either way, it’s both a new/old choice as well as a red/blue choice.
Time-in-office is also a major contributor to corruption. Lukashenko has been winning the same election for 30+ years!
Per wikipedia.
Wrt to the latter: the Swiss system prefers the elder candidate.
I would rather limit not amount of terms, but the age. Not eligible for any kind of elections if you are 60+, both as candidate and as voter.
It doesn't really show that, though. Putin was not stopped by term limits. Hitler seized power within a year of being elected. Lukashenko established his rigged state within two years. Fujimori launched a self-coup within two years. I'm actually not aware of evidence that term limits have ever meaningfully did anything to impede a would-be wrongdoer.
Australia has no term limits and has famously had the longest serving prime minister (12 years) followed by extremely short terms. All seemed to represent the general will of the population.
I’m not a political junkie but that makes sense to me. The critters who get your vote are just part of the system that runs the place.
You might say he introduced a kind of populism, where politicians only care about the next election round and their reputation, to the cost of important decision-making and long-term thinking. Unfortunately this is kind of a working strategy, a weakness of democracy, where the current centre-right government is struggling with all the aggravated problems not dealt with in the past, and the voters think "well, perhaps we have to vote VVD again where these problems didn't exist", or vote more right-wing by populism that makes immigration the cause of all problems.
Today, it’s always either the fault of the other party (who never had a real chance of making big changes), the rich (but if you tax them too much they leave and you’re left with no economy, see France), or the foreigners.
In the US, FDR stood 4 terms, and he was hardly the end of democracy.
Lula served two terms from 2002-2010, and came back in 2022 (now to serve until 2030, if he lives until then).
I do think term limits are good, but nonconsecutive 16 years is actually an ok limit IMHO. Maybe not the one I'd prefer for my government, but not necessarily objectively bad for democracy.
Long-term politicians result in "behind the scenes" doing the real work of running things.
Wait a minute ...
I am glad the son of a failed coup organizer and a trump puppet didn't get elected and am hopeful for Brazils ability to self govern. Breaking free of US financial monopolies (credit cards) gives me hope they'll continue to produce and innovative into a healthier and competitive world market, but I am also tired of Lula being at the helm and wish someone else could step up and take the reigns. When someone stays in power for so long in a democracy it makes me suspicious of the legitimacy of their power. Are they popular because they are good for the country or are they popular because they have the right people with power, influence, and money on their side.
Those weren't, as far as I can see, real predictions; they were people saying "the runner up in the runoff has never won, therefore the runner up in the runoff _cannot_ win". Which is fairly ridiculous; it's a _tiny_ sample size.
* Turnout. Made all the difference.
8 is a really small sample to consider it as unusual, plus the reversal was not that huge 1.8%
But, his dad:
> Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is serving a 27-year prison sentence after being convicted by Brazil's Supreme Court for plotting a coup following his 2022 election defeat
I don’t see how to read it any other way. Explain?
The Supreme Court in Brazil can be as rotten of political as it wants, to make a plan to assassinate political rivals is just completely unacceptable.
And before someone tries to defend the bolsonaros by saying they were not involved in this, don't use a defense that they themselves did not use. The defense that Flávio Bolsonaro said about the incident was "thinking of killing someone is not a crime".
Aprende com o nome dele e faz ai um "Já ir". De preferencia no...
How so?
I don't really follow Brazilian politics, but Jair Bolsonaro was found guilty by the Brazilian Supreme Court of:
participation in an armed criminal organization, attempted violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, attempted coup d'état, qualified damage, and deterioration of protected heritage property.[1]
Flávio Bolsonaro is Jair Bolsonaro's son. "attempted coup d'état" is a failed coup.
There don't seem to be any serious questions that the process was fair and that the Supreme Court was impartial (I mean there are always Trumpian accusations of bias, but I mean ones with any evidence at all).
The only part I could see possible disagreement with is organizer I suppose? But I must be missing something.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_for_the_2022%E2%80%93202...
This is the supreme court that in 2019 launched a perpetual "fake news" inquisition where they are themselves the victims, investigators, prosecutors, judges and executioners of wildcard crimes against themselves with a jurisdiction covering the entire territory of Brazil.
Saying that Bolsonaro was convicted by this court carries less weight to me than saying he was banned by dang.
The whole point of electing a right wing senate and Bolsonaro's son was to impeach and hold accountable the judges of this court. Obviously, that's never going to happen now. Lula will put four additional judges in there, and will rule uncontested until the day that he dies. It's the Venezuela model.
Examples:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39966382
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36543423
I also tend to comment on the matter extensively whenever it's brought up.
Here's my recollection of the events that happened before, during and after the 2022 election:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44619572
I think the abuses of the supreme court are well established.
What do you have to say about this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_Brazilian_co...
Jair Bolsonaro was tried and convicted of organizing a coup.
Flavio Bolsonaro is his son.
Where's the false part?
Pretty far fetched.
A lot of media outlets have been fingering the outage of some data centers due to kinetic action for a worldwide decline in divisive rhetoric, potentially impacting democratic processes.
What are smoking? If you bother to check, United24 clearly describes itself as "The official fundraising platform for collecting donations to support Ukraine."
https://mronline.org/2026/10/16/meta-acknowledges-the-reduce...
They have the supreme court. That is all they really need.
By the end of the next four years, Lula will finish his term with 70% of the seats of the supreme court being filled directly by his party.
They also stacked the lesser courts with judges which support him. Including the electoral court. We had judges who openly declared their vote for him judging his electoral complaints this entire month. Any guess which way the judges leaned?
Did you know one of the supreme court judges used to be Lula's own lawyer?
> and why does that mean that they're popular and win elections?
The supreme court literally engaged in unconstitutional censorship in order to get him elected in 2022. Judges also constantly barred Bolsonaro from doing things in 2022 that Lula was allowed to do this month, like lowering taxes at the gas pump before the election.
The supreme court was so incredibly politically active in 2022, it destabilized the country and led directly to the January 8th nonsense where people asked the military to enact a coup.
There's a saying here: "judges = gods". Actual lawyer told me that. And Lula owns the judges. If you don't see how having literal judge-god-kings on your side can tilt elections, then I don't know what I can possibly say to convince you.
Here's an example from the last four years: Lula implemented a tax on financial operations, our elected congress blocked it, then he went to the supreme court and they rammed it down our throats. Yes, the supreme court raised taxes. Not a single person voted for those judges, by the way. This is the Venezuela governance model.
The whole point of electing the right wing was to make those gods bleed. I'm going to go ahead and deflate my expectations now.
Do you have a source to read up on this?
Surely they're ruling on whether the executive branch has the power to do XYZ, right? So they don't directly endorse a policy, they decide who can do what?
You see the same in the US, with the decisions largely going the other way.
But that doesn't make you wrong. All presidential republics are like this when push comes to shove. There are two branches of government with equal claim to popular legitimacy, therefore every presidential republic in the world reels from one constitutional crisis to another like a drunken sailor.
My exploration of this mess ended at around 2019 which is when the "fake news" inquisition began. It's entirely possible that they were abusing their power for much longer, but I sincerely don't know. Please post details if you do.
> But that doesn't make you wrong.
Thank you.
> All presidential republics are like this when push comes to shove.
My impression is this is a Latin American phenomenon. It's how Maduro governed Venezuela, for example. It's the reason why Bukele had to depose the judiciary in El Salvador.
I simply have never heard of or read about anything similar ever happening in the US or Europe. Would appreciate counterpoints.
Unless you're relying on suppressing the capacity of certain parts of your population to vote to win an election, like my country's right wing government has done, because last minute enrollment voters tend to not vote for them.
https://www.justice.govt.nz/about/news-and-media/news/electo...
Polls were closed in some places, voting boxes sealed, and had to be reopened.
While not necessarily bad, it can create fraud suspicions. Just arrange a longer voting time from the get go. Else it looks you are stalling and boosting turnout out for your side.
PS it’s quite common in some countries to put people on buses and make them vote in exchange of money.
Have polling stations open for a week, run them 24 hours on election day. Have so many that there's never a queue, and no one complains that they have to go far. That's democracy. The price is negligible.
Then Lula asks for one, because his own people placed Lula stickers on busses which is an electoral crime and caused them to be grounded. Suddenly his former lawyer turned supreme court judge is moved to the point of tears at his plight and grants it immediately. The irony is not lost on me.
Of course just because there are technically flaws, doesn't mean it's not an improvement over the status quo.
Instant Runoff Ranked ballots are particularly well suited for electing a single position like a Mayor or President. Given that it's still a majoritarian system like First Pass the Post, it's a much more questionable system to use for other things like electing a parliament.
I remember seeing a 2D chart representing voter preferences on the X and Y axis, coloured by who wins under those preferences (and some symmetry-breaking assumptions). Some systems showed clear biases towards certain outcomes. IRV had a pretty symmetric shape but with a splotch in the middle that was a random jumble of different colours - an unpredictable, chaotic outcome.
The problem IMO is when there's better options but it's hard to get people to care enough to switch systems again. I'm hoping Ranked Robin can catch on so at least places that went to IRV can switch to a better system without new ballots.
STAR has been used approximately nowhere. STAR is also one of the few seriously advocated-for voting methods in which it's possible for the first choice of a majority to lose, although that isn't likely to happen in practice.
Same here. The idea of lobbying for a voting system where your vote for a candidate might hurt them, or where you might be better off not voting at all than expressing your honest preference is bizarre to me. If IRV was the only alternative, sure, but we have multiple other systems which don't have as bad tradeoffs. STAR or Ranked Robin would be so much better, but the Equal Vote Coalition doesn't seem to have the power behind it that FairVote does.
Preferential/ranked choice voting allows people to vote third-party while still expressing a preference for one of the majors.
It won for Bolsonaro whose campaign nailed it in 2018. It didn’t win in 2022 because he was completely bad in dealing with pandemics (mocking people dying and saying he had nothing to do with it being president).
Now, Lula’s campaign was absolutely dead during the whole time. Until it lost in the legislative by a mile and in the President run had a partial loss in the first round. Then the campaign lit up after the partial upset.
Janones, an energetic young guy elected to legislative with good online presence led the campaign. He achieved creating a WhatsApp group with 11 million people called “Lula’s army”. He would give the directions and the people would obey almost blindly.
The interwebs (basically WhatsApp + Instagram) got flooded with this top to bottom Lula’s campaign.
The first round results made Bolsonaro very favorite. Lula victory was a huge upset. I put the merit in this incessant social media campaign.
The thing is: “centrally planned cohesive campaign” looks a lot like a cult. The point of the campaign is not critical thought or argumentation, it is incessant messaging. Think fandoms.
Bolsonaro voters pejorative nickname from past campaigns was they were all “cattle”. Because that is how they behaved online. Ironically, what worked for Lula voters this year was they behaving like “cattle”. Just reposting and following this central orders on what to post, what to say, what to dress.
The thing is, it works. Cult-like fandoms work in elections. The right won a few elections like this in the world. In Brazil, the left just learned how to do it was well.
The more mindless posters a politician has following their campaign HQ orders, the more votes they have.
He was arrested for the biggest corruption scandal this country ever had. People ratted him out. He was the guy at the top.
Then the supreme court cited some technicality like "his initial judgement took place in the wrong court" and just undid the entire thing. They did it because nobody else could take out Bolsonaro.
Then he ran against Bolsonaro and took him out in 2022. And he just did it again.
It's Brazil. Crime pays. Lula's existence is proof. This country will never truly change.
Besides, Jair Bolsonaro won when Lula was still in jail.
And you're right, Lula's imprisonment changed everything. It was a moment of hope for many of us, and the reason why Bolsonaro even had a chance to begin with. Surely you can understand why the supreme court breaking the guy out of jail and putting him in the presidential race again while censoring everything Bolsonaro said and did would cause people to stop believing in justice?
The first instance judge colluded with the prosecution, and when the supreme court was about to rule on a habeas corpus, a general tweeted a thinly veiled threat of military coup if the sentence wasn't confirmed. And the evidence was scant to begin with. Hardly surprising that the conviction was eventually overturned.
Bolsonaro's condemnation, on the other hand, was backed by much more comprehensive evidence, and resulted from a heavily scrutinized process.
From 2 courts with 5 judges each.
At some point, you cross over from being misguided to an embarrassment to yourself.
If this stuff is "right wing propaganda", then it's damn good propaganda, because it convinced me. I genuinely believe it's the truth.
I do accept that I could be wrong. This is, in fact, the reason why I post. I am desperately hoping you people are going to show me that my entire world view is wrong and that I'm mistaken. You think I want to believe that I live in a juristocracy, a dictatorship of the judiciary? It's a painful truth that I absolutely don't want to be true. Yet that is the conclusion I have reached, after personally witnessing the actioms of the supreme court circa 2022.
If you think otherwise, then say so and explain your reasoning. Why do you think I take the time to painstakingly elaborate on my thought process every single time it's brought up? I want you all to attack it. If you can make the case that I'm wrong, then I will be forced to accept it. If I haven't accepted something, it's because I wasn't convinced by whatever "evidence" you claim people have showed me before.
The worst thing you could possibly do, however, is reply to me with these subtle implications of mental illness, as though my brain was not working correctly. If you have to stoop to this sort of disgusging gaslighting, I will take it as a sign that I am right.
Lula may well be guilty of corruption, but Bolsonaro (senior) isn't in it for wider Brazil either. I'm not trying to preach disillusionment, but in 2026 in most of the heavily polarised countries, if we start from a position that they are both acting in pure unadulterated self-interest we'll at least not have blinkers on with respect to the saviour fascist "says what everyone is thinking" strongman, or the current polished establishment status quo spokesman, etc.
That's genuinely terrifying. Can you elaborate on what's going on in the US? I haven't been tracking US politics.
I agree with you about Bolsonaro, but he was the only chance we had to defeat Lula and oppose the supreme court. It's all over now.
Really? Here is a comment you made very recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50228883
> If I had a button that would burn that entire jungle down and replace it with a top tier national semiconductor industry, I'd press it twice.
If you did a poll based on statements like these, 100% of people will tell you that you need serious help.
This is the Bolsonaro I know. I'm here to kindly ask you to free your mind from the shackles of his vile social network and see for yourself what he truly is, including seemingly innocuous "family" whatsapp groups and so on.
I don't think Bolsonaro is a savior. I think he is a traitor to his country and to everybody who ever supported him.
I think that if he had actually had balls, he would have actually attempted a coup. Then he would have either won outright or gone down fighting, and his little prison term would have actually been warranted. What he did instead was hop on a plane to the USA like a rat and let my fellow countrymen take the fall for him. His subsequent arrest was predictable, and I didn't feel sorry for him. I don't even defend him against the coup accusations. My position is that the supreme court enacted its own silent coup in 2019 and usurped all power. His coup would merely be a counter to the supreme court's own coup.
I also don't generally disagree with people when they criticize the Bolsonaro family's calls for sanctions against Brazil as a political maneuver. That is treason. I celebrated the Magnitsky sanctions against the supreme court judges, not the ones Trump enacted against the whole country.
My general position is anti-supreme court. You can find me temporarily aligned with Bolsonaro for the purposes of defeating the influence of the supreme court, an effort that clearly failed as of today. You won't find me defending his plans to privatize and sell off the country to the USA and Israel.
There is exactly one politician which represented me: Dr. Enéas Carneiro. He's dead, and is not at all similar to Bolsonaro. I suggest you read about him if you want to understand what I actually think.
I've also been drawing uncomfortably close to the extreme left wing party PCO. Inexplicably, they share many of the viewpoints that I express here. They too are shunned by the "traditional" left that Lula represents, for the same reasons as yours. Pretty wild.
> inciting the population into dividing themselves
Lula's the one who pioneered the politics of polarization in this country. He feeds off Bolsonarism as much as Bolsonarism feeds off him.
> his vile social network
> "family" whatsapp groups and so on
I participate in exactly zero of such channels. HN is the only forum where I post my political viewpoints, and only on Brazil threads. I don't talk about politics with family members at all.
You could argue that about pretty much every politician and their supporters in India. The right wing keeps winning because the left refuses to address the fears of a majority of the Indian population. Even if those fears are unwarranted - dismissing them as "uneducated" and "blind sheep" alienates people even more.
And also because the entire state apparatus was engaged in unconstitutional censorship of his "centrally organized, cohesive, persistent online engagement" machine, which is what wins elections, as you noted.
And now that Janones set up his own "Lula's Army", Brazilian institutions did not manifest even a fraction of the energy they had shown while persecuting Bolsonaro.
Lula was allowed to do everything Bolsonaro was persecuted for in 2022. He even lowered taxes on fuels, and got away with it. The tax cut ends tomorrow.