hey now, don't insult the animals, they have more standards than this.

It doesn't help the the party who spruiks that they're for the working class, has done nothing but fellate the epstein class and tell the workers 'We've got ours' for the last 3 years.

Absolutely nothing done on housing but it's all good, they passed a tax cut for the rich!

Vote Greens if you want real change. Labor are liberal-lite (and it's becoming less 'lite' day by day)

Edit: Don't forget that Labor are union-busters and want lower working conditions for laborers.

Brazilian economy is doing OK. Growing higher that predicted expectations, low inflation compared with the rest of the world (the government determine gasoline and Diesel prices so it's shielded from international shocks). But people live on algorithmic bubbles that show them violence, crime and rage bait 24/7, all of that plus "I like Lula but my pastor told me to vote Bolsonaro" evangelicals

I dont know. But I know a far right candidate won't. Factually not in their ideology.

This is the thing people keep missing. Democracy is usually reactionary. What gets people to come vote is to "throw the bums out", to bring in change. It's hard to get people to rally around the boring old status quo, especially if people think the status quo sucks.

Bolsonaro didn't so what's your point?

The Lula admin's Bolsa Família giving R$600 to unemployed and retired people, a push for fully electrifying rural parts of Brasil that have lacked electricity, same with running water. This gave him a huge amount of support from northeast Brasil because it literally saved families from starvation having the extra money to buy food or cooking gas.

Bolsonaro opposed all of this because of course he did.

Well... not by much. I guess he did what he could, but his administration was hamstrung by a wildly right leaning legislature. By the way, even if some kind of miracle nets him his 4th term, he would have to deal with an even more extreme-right-leaning Congress.

Since nobody is answering you: no, nobody's lives got better. Economy is in stagflation, crime is is worse than it ever was, no relevant housing projects, no relevant infrastructure investment, education reform, etc. The tax reform will take a decade to come in effect.

Oh but there were a ton of new taxes, including for small goods imported from overseas, which everybody used to buy constantly (shein, temu, etc). Made the post office (public company) lose several billions per year and only increased effective tax revenue by a few hundred million. So the government lost overall and the people lost. At the same time, a new head to the post office and several high paying jobs there were appointed from the government party.

This kind of thing keeps happening so people just want something new and there are no other lefty candidates because Lula never shared power

This is opposite to what I'm seeing.

Here's the important chart:

From this, the 1.87% difference can be overcome by any of the 3rd-4th-5th place parties. Since I'm unfamiliar with Brazilian politics, Wikipedia says Avante is center-left-leaning (voted for Lula previously), Missao is hard-right-wing, and SDP is confusing but appears to now be center-left-wing. So if we are now pushing their voters to polarized ends, the right- and left-wing runners-up cancel each other out, and the remaining party's votes could swing the election.

The problem will be if the weaker-left two parties divide their votes between Lula and Flavio, and the hard-right Missao goes to Flavio 100-ish%, then Flavio still wins. Or some other problem a real Brazilian will point out since I'm just piecing this together from Wikipedia.

There is no candidate more to the right of Bolsonaro. He is the frothing-in-the-mouth, extreme-far-right candidate.

The majority of those 8% intend to vote for Lula on the second round, where both Flavio and Lula are tied on the polls and neither is "poised to win".

Also, international press is incompetent.

Also also, WTF does "more right-wing" than alt-right means?

That french invention, that gravity assisted rail-mount blade system, is quite effective even as a deterrent

Well that’s not good

Idiocracy was a documentary

My perspective is the European periphery (Greece) and Canada. I don't know in particular what the Brazilian parliament is doing. I suspect (feel free to correct me) that within a presidential system, where parliament can be weaponized against a personalist presidency, sure it can become a vehicle for irresponsible brinksmanship, just like in the US. But the moment a parliament becomes itself responsible for governing, when things cannot be blamed on some singular President, when governments can lose the confidence of the parliament and elections can be triggered things change and parliaments have to start taking shit seriously.

That said, Parliamentarianism is not the perfect democratic system, it's just better than Presidentialism. It is also not a guarantee against fascism (cf Hungary, Italy), it is just harder to subvert them. It is no coincidence that democracies that slide to authoritarianism tend to reform themselves into presidential systems, like Turkey. And of course, the real question is what is even better than both, how do we perfect democracy beyond 19th century political technologies, but that's a different discussion.

What's the penalty if you don't?

Apparently 20% abstained.

And yet 33M of Brazilians skipped the elections...