[ad_1]
Brazil held elections on Sunday in the country’s more than 5,000 municipalities, after a bloody election campaign that resulted in the murder of some 80 candidates.
According to local media, 33 of the 45 mayoral candidates that President Jair Bolsonaro supported during the electoral campaign have suffered a defeat.
Perhaps the most painful took place in Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city in the country. The incumbent mayor, Bolsonar Marcelo Crivella, received only a fifth of the votes. In a second electoral round, Crivella will face the center-right candidate Eduardo Paes, who received 37 percent.
In the largest city in BrazilIn the mega-metropolis of Sao Paulo, Bolsonaro’s candidate received just over 10 percent of the vote and was eliminated.
The current mayoral candidate Bruno Covas, from the right-wing Social Democratic party PSDB, and Guilherme Boulos, the new star of the left, will go to the second round of the elections.
Guilherme Boulos belongs to PSOL, a left party that has obtained many votes from the Labor Party of former president Lula da Silva, Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT.
Local elections have not only been considered a measure of the value of Jair Bolsonaro’s popularity, but also of the confrontation between the two left-wing parties.
Although Lula da Silva’s party is still larger than the competition, local elections have shown that the PT is far from the golden years in which he ruled the country between 2003 and 2016.
An example: The party obtained its worst electoral result so far in Sao Paulo, which was previously a strong PT stronghold.
Political analysts agree that Lula da Silva’s party has suffered from the same disease as its right-wing opponents, corruption.
The turnout in yesterday’s local elections was very high, which is believed to be a consequence of the fear of corona infection, which has so far claimed more than 165,000 lives in the country.
On November 29, a second electoral round will be held in the municipalities where no candidate obtained more than 50 percent of the votes.
