From TLDR News, this is your Daily Briefing from Monday 3rd October 2022. Good afternoon and welcome to a very special episode of the Daily Briefing, the election special. Over the weekend there were a number of elections across Europe, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria and Latvia and in Brazil and as such we thought we'd bring you up to speed on the background of these elections and what it means for the future of each respective country. We'll also be discussing whether the UK will adopt a proportional representation.
If you want to watch this this is only available on Nebula, you can find out more at the end of the video. But before we begin we should mention that this will be the last Daily Briefing for a week or so, owing to staff absences. Don't worry though because we've just tied a new editor which should ensure that we don't need to keep turning the briefing on and off. Anyway, let's start with Brazil.
Brazil's presidential election was perhaps one of this year's most anticipated votes. As the world's fourth largest democracy, 12th largest economy, a country with huge natural resource and of course stewardship over much of the Amazon rainforest, Brazilian elections are always significant. This year's is particularly dramatic, as incumbent right-wing President Ter Bolsonaro is being challenged by leftist former President Louise in RCO Lula to Silver, known as Lula. The battle has been described by some as a clash of the Titans.
The first round of the presidential election was held yesterday and around 120 million resilience cast their votes. As expected, Lula came out on top with just under 48.5% of the votes, beating out President Bolsonaro who received 43.2%. The rest of the votes went to a number of minority candidates. Whilst Lula winning the first round was widely expected, his five-point margin of victory over Bolsonaro was considerably smaller than Paul suggested.
Paul's release the day before the election gave him a 14-point lead. Some polls had even suggested that Lula might surpass the 50% needed in the first round to outright win the election without the need for a run-off. But the result confirms that a run-off vote between Lula and Bolsonaro will be held at the end of the month on the 30th of October, meaning the tough election is far from over. A second round victory for Lula would be the latest in a series of victories for the left-wing in Latin America, with leftists winning recently in Bolivia, Chile and Colombia.
It would be a remarkable comeback for the 76-year-old, who left office after two terms in 2010 with a record high approval rating. But just three years ago, we sat in a prison cell after being handed a 12-year sentence for corruption. This conviction was later annulled, paving the way for his presidential run. But the narrower than expected first-round results might have brought Lula and his supporters back down to Earth.
A Brazilian academic and journalist said the results showed that Bolsonaro and Bolsonaro were alive and kicking. President Bolsonaro has, in the years running up to the election, cast doubt over the integrity of Brazil's electoral system, leading to fears that he may refuse to concede he does indeed lose the election. As a hard-line conservative, much of his support comes from Brazil's evangelical Christian population, who appreciates his social conservative views and controversial comments on things like LGBTQ plus rights and abortion. He also finds support from ranchers and farmers in agricultural states who back his view that the Amazon rainforest is Brazil's resource to exploit for economic gain, in contrast to Lula, who pledged to bolster measures to protect the Amazon, which saw record high deforestation in the first half of the year.
So the deeply polarized election will continue until the end of the month, and the tough rhetoric will likely ramp up. Bolsonaro has positioned himself as the defender of traditional family values and is called Lula a thief who will turn Brazil into Venezuela. Lula has previously referred to Bolsonaro as a madman and will be hoping that the memories of his popular government and things like Bolsonaro's chaotic handling of the COVID pandemic, which left almost 700,000 dead, will propel him to victory. On Saturday, Bosnia and Herzegovina held elections for the three members of its tripartite presidency, the president of the Republic of Serpska and the Lower House of Parliament.
To understand these elections, you need to know a bit about Bosnia's electoral system. Bosnia and Herzegovina is split into two so-called entities. Republic of Serpska, a Serb-dominated region that curls around Bosnia's north and east borders, and a federation of ten so-called cantons, which are basically devolved meaning governments with their own elections and legislatures, mostly populated by ethnic Bosniaks and Croats. These two entities have broad autonomy, but are linked by shared national institutions including the presidency.
To placate the three major ethnic groups, Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs, the presidency is tripartite, with three rotating presidents, one from each ethnic group who were elected on Sunday. While the Bosniaks and Croats elected relative moderates, the Serbs elected a rather more extreme Serb nationalist, who's in favour of Serbian independence from Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Rawbad News for Bosni and Unity, it looks like another Serb nationalist, Mylarand Doddic, was elected as the regional president in Republic of Serpska. The election was overshadowed by the decision by the High Representative, an unelected German called Christine Schmidt, to impose a new and continuous electoral law just minutes after the polls closed, sparking fury amongst basically all the candidates and accusations of electoral fraud.
There's more on the way, but be sure to subscribe and ring the bell to make the daily briefing part of your daily routine, or just search for us on your podcast app to listen along. On Sunday, Bulgarians voted in their fourth election in under two years, and it appears as though the country's protracted political crisis may continue. While results are not out in full, exit polls and preliminary results suggest that the conservative opposition, Gerbe, party, led by former Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, will come out as the largest party, with some 25 per cent of the vote. In second place, with around 20 per cent, looks to be the reformist reconsting you the change party, led by Kirill Petrov, whose cabinet collapsed in June, paving the way for Sunday's snap election.
The EU and NATO member state faces a number of issues, including rising energy costs and inflation, questions over Russian gas, as well as entrenched corruption, an issue that was at the centre of large protests against Borisov's government in 2020 and 2021. The results may well result in Borisov returning to office, having already been Prime Minister for more than a decade until 2021, but forming a functioning coalition will be an uphill struggle as many of his political rivals accuse him of allowing corruption to flourish during his tenure and have ruled out working with him in government. Latvia's centre-wide new unity party came on top in Saturday's election, meaning incumbent to Prime Minister Cristianis Carrens is on course to form another coalition government. The difficulty economic situation, rising energy prices and Russia's invasion of Ukraine were all on the mind of voters, and the results mean that Latvia will continue to be decisive and vocal in its stance against Russia.
The election saw a considerable rearrangement of Latvia's parliament, with a number of parties falling below the 5 per cent threshold required to get any seats, including the centre-left harmony party, which was something of an umbrella party for Latvia's ethnic Russians. It was a dramatic fall for harmony, which had been the largest party in the last three elections. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Carren's new unity party went from being the smallest party in parliament at the last election to being the biggest. That's all we have time for on YouTube today, but if you want to see our discussion of proportional representation in the UK, then what's the extended ad-free edition of the Daily Briefing over on Nebula?
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