The leader of the PT, Lula da Silva, on Sunday after voting in the municipal elections.Fernando Bizerra / EFE
The most polarizing figures in Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro and his predecessor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, embody the great defeated in municipal elections to which no one appeared and which concluded this Sunday.
The Brazilian electorate expressed a forceful rejection of the extremes at the electronic ballot box and rewarded the classic center-right.
Lula's Workers Party (PT) falls to record lows.
What was at the beginning of the century the great party of the Latin American left continues to decline and loses visibility.
It has not managed to reverse the loss of territorial power that has dragged on since the
impeachment
and, for the first time since the end of the dictatorship in 1985, not one of the 26 capitals will govern.
The coronavirus was felt because abstention was very high (30%) although voting is mandatory.
The second round of the elections confirmed the trends observed two weeks earlier and offers some clues about how the scenario is shaping up before the presidential elections of 2022. All the candidates sponsored by Bolsonaro were defeated, which is a serious blow to the president, who adds to the symbolic effect of Donald Trump's defeat in America.
It reduces his options but does not eliminate the possibility of being reelected from the horizon.
The truth is that in the middle of the term, the ultra-rightist has no solid rival at the national level despite the economic, public debt and health crisis.
Notable as humiliating is the defeat of the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, an evangelical pastor, who has lost resoundingly to a broad anti-Bolsonaro front in the president's electoral fiefdom and despite his support.
The PT does not raise its head four years after its forced exit from power in an impeachment process agitated by a popular outcry.
The woman who could indicate a certain generational change and encourage her in a political environment still marked by intense antipetism was defeated in Recife (Pernambuco, Lula's home state).
Marília Arraes, 36, was running for mayor with a cousin of hers who won in a tight battle.
It was also an internal duel in one of the more traditional political clans in the Northeast.
All the PT lost in the capitals in this second round.
Lula, 75 years old and confined by the pandemic, continues to be their main asset and, for many, their main burden.
The founder and undisputed leader of the party outshines everyone in the PT, although he is still prevented from running in elections due to his corruption convictions.
The diminished territorial power of the PT is centered in the south of the city of São Paulo, where a unionist Lula cemented his career with worker mobilizations against the dictatorship, and in the impoverished northeast, where the fruits of PT programs such as Bolsa Familia are evident. which have become state policies that even the right defends.
"Today the PT is a party from the interior of the Northeast that has returned to the size it had in the nineties (before the presidencies of Lula)," explains historian Lincoln Secco, author of the book
Historia del PT
.
“It does not govern any capital for the first time, it does not have new leaders or new ideas.
Even so, it continues to be the largest and most solidly capillarized left party in Brazilian society, to the point that it endured for years a campaign of annihilation by the Brazilian press ”, adds this professor from the University of São Paulo (USP ).
And although the PT parliamentary group is the second largest in Congress, it lacks prominence in a political debate that Bolsonaro practically monopolizes.
In addition, it is likely that Lula and his party will lose their traditional role on the left in favor of Guilherme Boulos, a 38-year-old activist and teacher who achieved the feat of placing his formation - a kind of little brother of the PT - in the second back from São Paulo, the main city of Brazil.
With a conciliatory tone, the candidate of the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), born from a split in the PT, has managed to emerge from these elections as the freshest figure on the Brazilian left despite his defeat.
The current mayor, Bruno Covas, 40, of the center-right, easily beat this former homeless worker rights activist.
Covas, who has recently suffered from cancer, belongs to the classic Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB).
Although Covas is the grandson of a mayor of São Paulo - Brazil is a land of deep-rooted political dynasties - his political mentor is Governor João Doria, who in this health crisis has become the great antagonist of Bolsonaro and is insistently singled out as a candidate in the next presidential ones.
The PSDB, the classic center-right parties and the constellation of abbreviations of diffuse or non-existent ideology that traditionally dominated Brazilian politics have returned with force in these elections.
They have gained territorial power in these first elections after Bolsonaro's unexpected victory in 2018 with his speech against the old politics, corruption and the usual fixes.
Bolsonaro, who is a chaotic manager and negotiator, but is a survivor with political instinct, has been for months forging closer ties with those amorphous parties that he denounced so much in the electoral campaign, those always willing to exchange parliamentary support for positions with a budget.
Nor have these elections practically altered the scarce presence of women and blacks among those elected, despite the fact that there have been quotas for years for them and, since this election, for blacks.
Only one of the 26 state capitals, Palmas (Tocantins), will have a mayor in a country with a single female governor, two ministers and where a fifth of the municipalities do not have a single councilor.
Black mayors have risen and will rule a third of the capitals.
It shows how fluid the issue of race is in Brazil, where each citizen is registered with the color they declare, thousands of the candidates for re-election in the municipal elections participated with a different race in 2016. Some darkened and others bleached .