The president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, greets his followers after voting this Sunday in Rio de Janeiro.Antonio Lacerda / EFE
The mayoralties of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the two largest cities in Brazil, are the highlight of the second round of municipalities that 60 cities celebrate this Sunday.
The first round, on November 15, was a setback for President Jair Bolsonaro and the victory of the traditional right.
Although they are elections that are decided mainly by local dynamics, they will also allow us to glimpse the potential of the alliances against Bolsonaro - the prognoses for his candidates are bad - and if the left intensifies the progress that the polls in São Paulo give it to surprise and win the mayoralty of the richest city in the country.
Although with little media coverage, the violence has hit the campaign hard.
Some 200 candidates have been killed, injured or victims of an attempt to kill them, according to the Superior Electoral Court.
Bolsonaro has backfired in his strategy of scorning the severity of the coronavirus, which has killed 172,000 Brazilians, and blaming governors and mayors for the economic ravages of the pandemic.
The president seemed confident that the millions of reais of public money that he has given to the poorest Brazilians would be enough for the candidates named by him to triumph.
It was not like that in the first round and, according to the polls, it will not be in the second either.
This week, coinciding with an increase in hospitalizations due to the covid, he came to accuse the press of inventing the statement that has become the synthesis of his management of the pandemic, that the coronavirus is "like a flu," words which he delivered in a speech to the country in March.
In these elections "we see a cooling of the extreme right, a strengthening of a traditional right, a greater plurality on the left", summarizes the political scientist Flavia Bozza Martins, from the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro.
He adds that in the midst of the health crisis, the electorate has opted for politicians with management experience and has punished anti-system or
outsider
candidacies
.
Bolsonaro supported a handful of candidates distributed by various initials in the first round of the municipal elections because he has not been a party for a long time.
Two went to the second round.
Those two sponsored ones are your option to save honor in these elections.
His main asset is the evangelical pastor Marcelo Crivella, who aspires to be re-elected mayor of Rio de Janeiro, the political stronghold of the president and the second largest city in Brazil.
But Crivella's poor performance in the first round has been compounded by a broad front of almost everyone else against him, which has ended up sinking him in the polls.
Crivella has around 30% voting intention compared to 70% for Eduardo Paes, according to data from Datafolha this Friday.
Almost the entire political arc, from the traditional right to the extreme left, has asked for the vote for Paes in order to defeat a mayor who embodies ultra-conservatism and generates great rejection.
Support for Paes is enthusiastic in some cases.
Others will vote for him holding their nose.
Because the one who was mayor of Rio de Janeiro in the years of the World Cup and the Olympic Games is haunted by suspicions of corruption, although he has never been formally accused.
Passionate about Carnival, his supporters highlight the improvements in transport as the best of his management (2009-2017).
Also in Fortaleza, a large front has been created against the candidate designated by the president, the military policeman Wagner Souza, now determined to dissociate himself from Bolsonaro.
There the alliance has been forged around the man of the political clan that rules the region, the family of the leftist Ciro Gomes.
He takes 20 points from Captain Wagner.
The closest battle is that of São Paulo, where Bolsonaro failed to place his candidate in the second round.
The duel is between the mayor, Bruno Covas, from the center right, and the leftist Guilherme Boulos, an activist and teacher who surprised when he went to the second round and who has since risen to eight points behind the councilor.
In case the pulse lacks intrigue, Boulos tested positive for coronavirus on Friday, which has suspended the last debate and is in quarantine.
The candidate has given a formidable boost to the small Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), a split born from the left flank of the Workers' Party.
"I do not want to celebrate the goal ahead of time, but I believe that we are in a period of less unleashed passions, where rationality, listening, space for government proposals, for debate, that which every democracy requires, increases," he says the political scientist Martins.
“Will it be maintained for (the presidential elections of) 2022?
It is not known ”.
The best trick that the PT has to save his honor, after the poor result in the first round, is in Recife.
It is also the electoral dispute that attracts the most curiosity because it faces two cousins, heirs of a political clan.
Petista Marília Arraes and João Campos are in a technical tie.