The next fight between Lula and Bolsonaro: Brazil's municipal elections in October

Next October, Brazilians will return to the electronic polls to elect more than 5,000 mayors. But the result of the municipal elections will also offer a snapshot of the correlation of forces between the two large blocs headed by the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 78, and his great rival and predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, 68. Both are already warming up for that next electoral duel. At this point in 2024, Lula will be at the halfway point of a mandate in which he leads a Government that includes a wide range of political forces that has returned calm to politics and public debate. The 2022 presidential elections drew a Brazil divided into two almost equal halves, with a very slight advantage that the Presidency gave to the leader of the left and the Workers' Party.

The municipal elections will simultaneously serve to evaluate the performance of this third Lula government and also the strength of the movement led by Bolsonaro, which goes beyond the acronym he joined to contest the presidential elections, the Liberal Party.

President Lula has already warned that, after a first year in office very focused on the international agenda with continuous trips abroad, in 2024 he intends to tour his gigantic country again. Bolsonaro has already begun to do so, trying to emulate the strategy that gave him a surprising victory in 2018, when he was an irrelevant deputy, more famous for his nostalgia for the dictatorship and his outbursts than for his influence. He is now a former president whom the judges disqualified in June for abuse of power who still has multiple judicial fronts open. Among these cases, the Supreme Court's investigation stands out for alleged incitement of the coup attempt a year ago in Brasilia.

Lula and the Workers' Party (PT), which he leads, aspire to recover local political power, which is at a minimum after in 2020 the most solid political formation in Brazil suffered the worst defeat in its history in municipal elections. He did not conquer a single state capital and governs 182 cities, less than half of those he managed two decades ago.

The parties are still baking the lists, which will be defined starting in March, but everything seems to indicate that the PT will not present candidates for mayor of the country's main cities, such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia or Belo Horizonte. It is due, in part, to the commitments made with other parties that supported Lula in the presidential elections. The dozen parties integrated into the Cabinet of 40 ministries that Lula presides compete in the municipal elections separately.

Between his multiple appointments with the police and judges, Bolsonaro has resumed his travels through Brazil. He is on a permanent campaign with various events in small cities. The Bolsonaro clan aspires to present candidates in thousands of cities, including state capitals, and thereby extend its far-right movement to the municipalities alongside the Liberal Party, but seeking votes far beyond that fishing ground.

And between the blocs headed by Lula and Bolsonaro, a giant center populated by an endless number of parties without much ideological support, leaning to the right, simple representatives of interest groups or territorial clans clinging to power. The alliances and combinations can be infinite.

Adding to the difficulty of making forecasts is the penchant of Brazilian politicians for changing parties or forging alliances that would have been unthinkable. For example, the current vice president, Geraldo Alckmin, of the center-right, and Lula forgot the scuffles that confronted them in several disputes for the presidency to join forces, oust Bolsonaro and save democracy.

This same Tuesday, the public money fund to finance the municipal electoral campaign was approved. It will be 4.9 billion reais (one billion dollars), more than double what was allocated in the previous ones and much more than what the Government wanted. But the parliamentarians have once again demonstrated their strength. This fund that finances the Treasury was created in the peak years of the Lava Jato investigation to cut off companies' financing to parties in exchange for favors.

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