Heart attack ending. The most populous democracy in Latin America completed the first round of municipal elections this Sunday with a very close recount in the most relevant dispute, that of São Paulo, the largest city in Brazil. The current mayor, a nondescript right-winger named Ricardo Nunes, and the leftist Guilherme Boulos, sponsored by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, will contest the second round on the 27th in this megalopolis of 12 million inhabitants, as confirmed by the Superior Electoral Court. The duo, both politicians of a classic nature, have managed to barely neutralize the outsider Pablo Marçal, a former evangelical self-help guru. The elections have, however, been a walk for the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, the centrist Eduardo Paes, supported by Lula, who has defeated Bolsonarism in his fiefdom and is embarking on his fourth term.
More than 155 million voters were summoned to vote in an electronic ballot box and compulsorily under penalty of a fine to elect the mayors and councilors of the 5,569 municipalities. In those cities where no candidate has obtained half plus one of the valid votes, such as São Paulo, there will be a second round on October 27.
The polarization that has dominated the Brazilian political landscape since 2018 has not carried over to these elections in which Lula and his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, from the extreme right and disqualified from contesting an election until 2030, have been largely absent. They have limited themselves to supporting candidates from their parties or allied acronyms, participating in a rally and little else.
This Sunday, only when 99.52% of the São Paulo ballots had been counted did the Superior Electoral Court confirm the result. An even tighter count than that of the second round of the presidential elections, at the end of 2022. Then Lula beat Bolsonaro by 1.8 points in the closest presidential election in the history of Brazil.
Nunes, the councilor of São Paulo, reluctantly supported by Bolsonaro, has won the first round with 29.59%, followed less than one point by the leftist Boulos, a deputy and former activist, with 29.07% already little more than one point for Pablo Marçal, the undisputed protagonist in the São Paulo campaign. The polls had been predicting this triple technical tie in the lead for weeks.
Marçal is a successful businessman, a social media star and a political novice who has systematically provoked, insulted and lied to his rivals without shame. First, to show its head among the consolidated candidates and then to rise in the polls. The emergence of outsider Marçal, who in the final stretch presented a false medical report to accuse his rival Boulos of being a cocaine addict, has opened a hole in the hegemony that Bolsonarism maintained in the Brazilian extreme right. Former President Bolsonaro, who at first laughed at him, realized that he posed a threat and supported the current mayor, whom polls show as the winner in the second round, when the right is expected to unite against the left.
In Rio de Janeiro, Mayor Eduardo Paes has been re-elected with 60% and will begin his fourth non-consecutive term. A great fan of samba, carnival and everything that characterizes Rio, Paes thanked Lula for his support, saying that the president “has the exact dimension of what Rio means for Brazil.” Although he is not from his party, the president will undoubtedly also be satisfied because the councilor has inflicted a severe defeat on Bolsonarism in his main fiefdom. The candidate supported by the Bolsonaro clan has had to be content with 30%.
These elections are considered, in a certain way, a thermometer to measure the relationship of forces between President Lula and Bolsonaro in the middle of the presidential term. And to see which names stand out and have options to place themselves in the race for the 2026 presidential elections, to which Lula does not rule out running despite the fact that he will be 80 years old.
The parties of both will face each other in Cuiabá (Mato Grosso) and in Fortaleza (Ceará), two of the 15 capitals that will decide the mayoralty in the second round.
Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT) has not managed to win any of the 26 capitals in the first round and will contest the second in four capitals. The formation that the president still leads without anyone overshadowing him was based on the disastrous results achieved in the municipal elections four years ago. Very weakened in recent years due to corruption scandals, the PT refused to present its own candidates in many of the capitals, including São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. He preferred to support candidates from other parties, thus returning the support received by Lula to win the presidential elections.
Bolsonaro is disqualified, but he remains the main figure of the right and maintains his strength as he demonstrated this Sunday. The Liberal Party (PL), the acronym with which the far-right party participated in the last elections, has won the mayorships of two capitals, Maceió (Alagoas) and Rio Branco (Acre), and has gone to the second round in nine others.
The previous president, excluded from the next elections by decision of the electoral justice system due to his systematic attacks against the security of the electronic ballot boxes, has not exploited that issue in this campaign. By the way, the youngest of his four sons, the only one who was not in politics, Jair Renan Bolsonaro, 26 years old, has been elected councilor in Balneário Camboriu, the Brazilian Dubai.
In any case, neither Bolsonaro nor Lula have had a prominent role in this campaign. The president was at the UN general assembly in New York this month and later at the inauguration of President Cláudia Sheinbaum, in Mexico.
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