What did you do this weekend?

Watched the first round of the 2020 elections, the municipal (for mayors and 'councillors') elections in Brazil. Took a few hours in most places unless there were technical problems, and a woman managed to vote on a stretcher thanks to public healthcare. 'Nuff said.

(The article is in Portuguese btw.)

But more seriously, to me the Municipal elections's results emphasize the 2 aspects of Brazilian politics I dislike the most, which I'll rant about.

The first round is basically FPTP but with 2 winners (example pic, the 2 candidates and parties highlighted are left of center and leftist), which had the same drawbacks and shows that the 2 round system doesn't work well enough and STV or RCV would be better. (And worse, since our current electoral system isn't as transparently broken as the US's system is, people don't really pay it any mind. Also, 2 rounds only applies to municipalities above 200k voting age people, of which there are 92.)

Large sections of the population aren't that ideological, but since there aren't that many limits to how many parties can be created (IIRC the cap is at like, 50), you can have parties which don't make a lot of effort in differentiating themselves ideologically/on policy and can use that to make things more confusing for voters, like having more people debating eachother or misnaming themselves (sometimes after a scandal) and small parties can be taken over by a dozen people and do the same thing which is what happened to the Social Liberal Party, the party which bolsonaro currently belongs in. This also makes municipal elections harder to follow since a party might be popular in a municipality from advertising alone (and makes for some really horrible maps) (source) and neighboring municipalities often vote for different parties even if they aren't that different, or will vote for different parties because the candidates are different or maybe not even that which, as someone who feels politics should be about people fighting for (arguing over) ideologies, really annoys me.

(Rant over.)

(Also note that all the links are in portuguese since I can't really find English sources that care.)

Anyway, as for the results, it seems like there is some decent movement towards the left and candidates backed/endorsed by Bolsonaro often have lost, but since this is the first round for the decently large districts and there are over 5000 municipal elections, saying anything definitive is still a bit early, and is harder thanks to everything I've described above

As for the municipality I live in (see bio), the leftist candidate (Boulos) over here made it to the second round on what (according to polling) was a opinion shift on the last week of so and the candidate that was in second (Russomano) fluking it hard for reasons I don't know. While he can pick plenty of votes from other leftist and left-ish candidates, the rightist candidate (Covas) seems like he can pick up far more, but we will have to see. There is also seeing what will the pro-Bolsonaro bloc will do, since their choices are voting for the vice of the anti Bolsonaro incumbent or a guy whose party is called "Socialism and Liberty Party" (although IIRC he isn't actually a socialist or running on socialism, hence my rant.)