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PPresident Jair Bolsonaro has not been able to consolidate his power at the local level. This is demonstrated by the results of the second round of elections for the still vacant mayoralties in Brazil on Sunday. You confirm the trend of the first vote, in which most of the candidates supported by Bolsonaro have already been eliminated. On Sunday, the president-sponsored mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Marcelo Crivella, suffered a clear defeat against challenger and former mayor Eduardo Paes of the conservative “Democrats” (DEM).
The defeat in Rio, Bolsonaro’s adoptive home, is particularly painful for him. Because the evangelical Crivella is the nephew of the founder of the universal church, Edir Macedo, who is considered one of Bolsonaro’s closest allies in evangelical circles. The victory of Paes is an example of the return of voters to the traditional forces of the so-called “Centrão”, the “great center”. Candidates in this broad field, occupied by numerous parties, prevailed against competitors from the left and right in many places.
In São Paulo, the former liberal mayor Bruno Covas of the traditional “Brazilian Social Democracy Party” (PSDB) won, which beat Guilherme Boulos of the “Party for Socialism and Freedom” (PSOL). Bolsonaro’s favorite, former evangelical TV host Celso Russomanno, was eliminated in the first round of voting after a crash at the polls.
Bolsonaro’s apathetic support
The victory of Covas plays in the hands of the governor of the state of São Paulo, João Doria. The liberal politician has become one of Bolsonaro’s strongest political opponents on the liberal-conservative spectrum in recent months. Local elections have shown limits to Bolsonaro. The reasons for the poor performance of your camp are complex. On the one hand, it is due to the nature of local elections, for the outcome of which, also in Brazil, concrete political issues are more important than ideological trench warfare.
The polarization that helped Bolsonaro win the election two years ago was less pronounced this time. Also, Bolsonaro is currently not a party. It was not always possible for the president’s supporters to determine which candidates could be attributed to Bolsonaro’s side. Before the first vote, Bolsonaro had left him with a rather listless selection of “his” candidates. In his usual live broadcasts on social networks, he made a series of recommendations and brought election posters to the cameras. However, he had largely refrained from appearing alongside the chosen ones.
It is also questionable whether that would have helped. Bolsonaro was almost a sure hit two years ago and many had ridden his wave of successes, but there was virtually no “Bolsonaro effect” in local elections. This was also clearly demonstrated in the elections for the members of the city parliaments in the first ballot. Since it is possible to run under a nickname in Brazil, dozens of candidates by the name of Bolsonaro had entered the lists. But only one of them was elected: Carlos Bolsonaro, the president’s son, who will remain in the Rio de Janeiro City Council. Even Bolsonaro’s ex-wife was not elected to the city council; Carlos Bolsonaro also lost numerous votes compared to the elections four years ago.
