Securing Democracy by Glenn Greenwald;

Author:Glenn Greenwald;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2021-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

– – – – – – – – – –

After an extremely arduous and difficult year—for our family and for Brazil—election night finally arrived on October 7. Supporters gathered at David’s campaign headquarters to watch the results come in. This time, confident in the campaign David had run, I decided I could bear the tension and didn’t hide alone in a hotel room nearby.

The initial results looked reasonably good for David. With the first returns from Niterói—a large city located just outside of the Rio precincts where David’s was strongest—he was already in seventh place out of more than fifty PSOL candidates, just two spots behind the fifth-place finish we all believed he needed to win. The expectation was that PSOL would win five congressional seats, ensuring that David would win as long he came in fifth or better within his party. Because two of the candidates in front of him were from Niterói, I was confident David would easily pass them as the much-larger Rio precincts started to be counted. Within less than an hour, David moved into the coveted fifth-place spot within his party. I wasn’t relaxed about the outcome, but for the first time I felt confident that David would win.

However, as the evening progressed, it started to become clear that the far-right Bolsonaro-led wave that was sweeping the entire country, including Rio, was far more extensive and engulfing than anyone had predicted. At roughly 9:00 p.m.—with only a fraction of the votes in the congressional races counted—the final total for the presidential race was announced. Bolsonaro had come close to a 50 percent majority in the first round of voting, among a crowded field of eight major-party candidates, something that would have been unprecedented in Brazilian democracy. He had received 46.2 percent of the vote, 17 points ahead of the second-place Workers’ Party ticket. That margin was overwhelming, and given how many of the eliminated candidates were from the center-right or the right, and thus would almost certainly end up endorsing Bolsonaro, the results left little to no hope that Bolsonaro could be defeated in the runoff. Those early results not only forced all of us to face the reality that it would be highly likely that a figure relegated to the far-right fringes of Brazilian politics for decades would become president, but also that his tiny far-right party would do far better than anyone anticipated.

As we hit the 10:00 p.m. mark, the large majority of the votes in the Rio congressional race had been counted. David continued to remain comfortably in fifth place. But the magnitude of the far-right wave made me question whether his party would in fact get five congressional seats from the state, as the party’s political advisers and experts had told us all year was essentially assured. Indeed, going into election night, the only question anyone was asking was whether PSOL would get a sixth seat. But it began to appear that the key assumptions behind this electoral calculus were failing.

With

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.