https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2023/01/how-they-count-votes-in-brazil/
Presented with an opportunity to explain the current turmoil in Brazil, Australia’s establishment media once again took the easy, lazy course by rounding up the standard cliches and memes to present as informed ‘analysis’.
To see just how bad the coverage has been, start with Augusto’s account (below) of how politics is played in Brazil. — roger franklin
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THE second round of Brazil’s presidential elections was held on Sunday, October 30. The former president, Lula da Silva, who has served prison time for corruption, apparently won 50.90% of the vote and the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, received 49.10%. In other words, Lula was declared winner with less than 1 per cent lead over Bolsonaro. This is according to judges of the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE), Brazil’s top electoral authority. It was an unexpected comeback for the former president, who was directly responsible for the biggest series of corruption scandals in the nation’s history.[1] Lula is “back at the scene of the crime”, according to the description made not a long time ago by his own vice-president in the presidential ticket. According to J.R. Guzzo, one of Brazil’s most accomplished journalists, the 2022 election in Brazil has been “a legal and political fraud as we have never seen in this country”.[2] In an article entitled De Volta à Cena do Crime (Back at the Scene of the Crime), he commented:
Lula returned to the presidency via the general collapse of the Constitution and Brazilian laws throughout the electoral process – the result of an unprecedented meddling of the judiciary, which was entirely illegal in each step of the process. The basic fact is that the judiciary, with Justice Alexandre de Moraes issuing orders and Lula in the role of its sole beneficiary, did everything it could for any neutral observer to conclude this was a rigged election … Basically, Supreme Court justices and its electoral arm, the Superior Electoral Tribunal, put together piece by piece a mechanism designed to favour the leftist candidate. The first step was for these unelected judges to simply overturn the four criminal convictions against Lula and, with it, perform the “magic” of disappearing with all the dirty record which precluded him from being a candidate.[3]
But there is a rather decisive international element in Lula’s victory as well. Just after a few outlets called the election in Brazil, U.S. President Joe Biden orchestrated a rapid international embrace of Lula. In a statement released immediately after the result was officially announced, Biden claimed that Lula had won “following free, fair, and credible elections”.[4] In short order, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak all released statements congratulating Lula. “The people of Brazil have spoken”, said Trudeau, writing within an hour and a half of the result.[5]
In August 2021, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan visited Brazil to issue the following warning to the Brazilian president: do not even dare even to question the reliability of your country’s electronic voting system.[6] A month earlier, in July 2021, the newly installed Biden sent his CIA director, William Burns, to travel to the country to meet with senior Brazilian officials. During that meeting, the U.S. delegation warned the Brazilian government that President Bolsonaro “should stop casting doubt in his country’s [entirely electronic] electoral process”.[7] Next, at the June 2022 Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, the Biden administration notoriously repeated the same warning that the U.S. government would not tolerate Bolsonaro casting any doubt on the reliability and security of the nation’s voting machines.[8] Since these messages came before the outcome of the election, this was a clear warning of dire consequences should the Brazilian president contest the alleged fairness and transparency of the electoral process.