Brazil’s Joyless Municipal Elections Are Over: So What Have We Learned?

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Brazil’s municipal elections concluded this week as 57 Brazilian cities held run-off races for Mayor. These contests were fiercely fought, sometimes downright ugly, and – as Presidential mid-term elections are wont to be – closely scrutinized for signs of shifting electoral sentiment. In this year’s relatively dour election cycle, political messages were not hard to discern.

Ironically, as he wasn’t on the ballot, the biggest loser in these Mayoral races was President Jair Bolsonaro. Of the raft of mayoral candidates he supported across the country, only five – in mid-size cities – won their races. None of his candidates running in the nation’s most important centers succeeded. Many failed even to make it into Sunday’s run-offs, losing by wide margins in state capitals such as Belo Horizonte, Recife, and Manaus.

São Paulo, a city of over 12 million inhabitants and Brazil’s largest, awarded just 10% of its vote to Celso Roussomano, the President’s anointed candidate, who finished fourth. Sunday’s run-off was contested by vocal critics of the President and won by the center-right PSDB incumbent Bruno Covas (60% to 40%) over the unexpectedly popular socialist PSOL candidate, Guilherme Boulos.

Likewise, the Bolsonaro-endorsed candidate in Fortaleza, Brazil’s fifth-most populist city, was defeated by a left-leaning candidate. Here, little known contender Sarto Nogueira upset the President’s pick and early favorite, Wagner Gomes (51.5% to 48.5%), despite a late attempt by Gomes to distance himself from Bolsonaro as his fortunes declined.

But the President’s greatest embarrassment was delivered by voters in his hometown of Rio de Janeiro, where incumbent Mayor Marcelo Crivela (Republicanos) was crushed in a run-off election on Sunday (64% to 36%) by his center-right predecessor Eduardo Paes (Democratas). Crivela, a Bishop of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, repeatedly referenced the President’s active support – in an attempt to revive what was widely regarded as a poorly run campaign – but to no avail.

Carlos Bolsonaro, head of his father’s social media team, retained his seat on Rio’s city council but finished second with just over 71,000 votes — considerably fewer than the 106,000 he received four years ago.

In Rio, as in many centers throughout the country, there was a strong sense that voters were driven to the polls not in support of a favored politician but in opposition to another. Under the seemingly relentless menace of Covid-19 with its gloomy litany of the infected and dead, this was an election primarily animated not by joy or optimism but by resentment and vitriol. The usual – slightly carnavalesque – atmosphere of flag-waving, parades, and beach parties, which typically accompany this civic rite, were mostly missing in this, the year of the pandemic.

In Rio, this was also an election which, notably in the two weeks before the run-offs, became overtly nasty and deliberately divisive.

Leaving the first round with a 400,000 vote deficit, an increasingly desperate Mayor Crivela resorted to defamation to revive his flagging campaign. In genuinely Trumpian fashion, he leveled accusations of corruption against his opponent and repeated baseless claims about his support for abortion, drug legalization, and even the promotion of pedophilia in schools.

Mocking Paes, an unequivocal fan of Carnaval, for parading in Sapucaí wearing a Panama-style “little hat of Zé Pelintra” Crivela seemed to echo prejudice towards Afro-Brazilian religious beliefs. Zé Pelintra, or Zé Pilintra, an important entity in the Umbanda faith, is regarded, affirmatively, as the patron spirit of bars, gambling houses, and gutters.

Paes, for his part, did not endure these attacks in stoic silence. He hit back in kind, enumerating the Crivela administration’s failings and dubbing Crivela the “father of lies” – an epithet widely interpreted as a thinly veiled reference to the devil.

While most of us may be relieved that the mudslinging is over, the incoming Mayor – in Rio de Janeiro as in cities across the country – faces truly huge challenges.

Brazil’s urban economies, already characterized by massive levels of inequality and further weakened by the pandemic, are in desperate need of formal job creation. Likewise, cities across the country require investment in health and sanitation to improve living conditions and reduce pollution in lagoons, rivers, and beaches – the sine qua non of Brazil’s tourist industry.

What Brazil’s new Mayors must now do, despite the exigencies of Covid, is unify their dispirited and beleaguered constituencies and address the burdensome challenges confronting the nation’s cities. Their efforts will shape Brazil’s urban future.