Electoral qualifier in Brazil – after two years with Bolsonaro – NRK Urix – Foreign news and documentaries

A train of people with waving flags passes through “Our Lady of Copacabana”, one of the most important shopping streets in Rio de Janeiro.

At the head of the train is a woman in a green shirt and a blue bandage with the number 12. It is the number of the center-left party PDT.

The woman’s name is Martha Rocha, the party’s candidate for mayor of Rio de Janeiro, one of the 5,569 Brazilian municipalities holding elections this Sunday.

Local elections in Brazil were supposed to be held in May, but were postponed due to the crown pandemic. And experts continue to warn that the election could lead to another sharp increase in coronation rates.

School against poverty

Of course, fighting the pandemic is an important issue for all parties and candidates during elections. But in Brazil, this is just one of many big problems. Others are: economic crisis, crime and huge differences between rich and poor:

– Education is the way to fight against social inequalities, says Martha Rocha to NRK.

– Therefore, our most important promise to voters here in Rio is to achieve a great improvement in the school offering. We want to create equal opportunities for all. This should be a matter of course, but it is completely absent in today’s society, he says.

And according to opinion polls, Martha Rocha could be the next mayor of Rio de Janeiro, although the favorite is the former mayor of the city Eduardo Paes.

Bolsonaros role

This weekend’s local elections are the first here in Brazil since President Jair Bolsonaro came to power nearly two years ago.

He is now almost halfway through his presidency, and the election matters when it comes to creating political alliances before the 2022 presidential election.

Jair Bolsonaro is now without a party, after breaking with the PSL, which he was a candidate for when he was elected president. But work is underway to register a new party and this party is expected to form a broad right-wing alliance.

But Bolsonaro’s efforts before local elections don’t seem to be paying off much. The candidates he has supported are misplaced at the polls in major cities like São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte.

And several candidates recommended by the president have not used their names in the electoral campaign.

Great interest

For a municipal election, Sunday’s event is followed with unusually great interest, both in Brazil and abroad.

Many Brazilians see it as an opportunity to express their views on the controversial president and his policies.

Bolsonaro has risen in popularity in recent months, mainly due to large emergency aid payments during the pandemic. But now the payments are cut in half and the popularity is falling.

At the same time, the president receives strong criticism for another of his infamous statements. During a conference this week, he had this to say about Brazil’s handling of the corona pandemic:

– We must stop being a country of “fags” (which means “pings” or “gays”).

There is also great tension over what the change of power in the United States will have to say about Bolsonaro and his politics, especially when it comes to deforestation in the Amazon.