(Bloomberg) -- Crime fears are dominating the run-up to mayoral elections in Brazil, a test for President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and the candidates he has backed in the Sunday races that will serve as an early referendum on his government.
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The concerns run so deep that right-wing candidates are invoking the brutal policies of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele while even a prominent leftist is touting his law-and-order credentials.
Nearly 60% of Brazilians said crime was their top concern in an AtlasIntel poll released last week, beating the economy that Lula has prioritized in hopes that stronger-than-expected growth would help blunt the right’s efforts to regain momentum after former President Jair Bolsonaro’s narrow loss two years ago.
Conservative candidates have seized on the persistently high crime rates that have long plagued Latin America’s largest nation, highlighting a challenge Lula may face in the 2026 presidential race even if the economy continues to outperform.
“There is a very strong perception of insecurity in Brazil, especially with evidence that its security policy does not work,” said Thomas Traumann, a political consultant who served in former President Dilma Rousseff’s government. “It’s an alternative for the right to escape the economic discourse, because it addresses the personal security of the voter: His ability to go to work without being assaulted, to avoid property crime.”
Pablo Marcal, a right-wing insurgent running for mayor in Sao Paulo, has touted his links to Bukele, whose crackdown on crime has raised concerns about the erosion of civil liberties but nevertheless made him one of Latin America’s most popular leaders.
Marcal traveled to El Salvador earlier this year to meet with Bukele’s security minister, saying later that he had gone to study policies he could bring back to Sao Paulo.
Both he and Mayor Ricardo Nunes, who has Bolsonaro’s backing in the race, have named law enforcement officials as their running mates — an increasingly common practice as candidates seek to bolster tough-on-crime images. Nunes has also proposed expanding the use of artificial intelligence and facial recognition to fight crime in Sao Paulo, promising to install 40,000 cameras equipped with the technology across the country’s biggest city.
Bukele has gained fans across a region that has experienced sharp increases in homicides from Mexico to Ecuador. Brazil is an outlier in that regard: Its number of murders has declined in recent years, according to official data.
But its roughly 46,000 homicides last year remained high by global standards, while other forms of crime are shockingly common: Nearly 10% of Sao Paulo residents said they have had a cell phone stolen in the past 12 months in a survey conducted by Datafolha in June.
Renato Brandao Alves, 61, said crime will shape his approach to the elections after his moving truck was stolen from outside his apartment in Belo Horizonte earlier this year — one of Brazil’s roughly 132,000 vehicle thefts so far in 2024.
“I’m always watching what happens out there, but you have no control, you have no hold on it,” Alves said, adding that it has also affected his search for a new job. “I ruled out Uber driver, due to the high rate of robbery and even, regrettably, death.”
Guilherme Boulos, a congressman from the Socialist and Freedom Party who is running for mayor in Sao Paulo with Lula’s support, has in recent weeks run advertisements focused on crime, while outlining plans to double the number of local law enforcement officials. He has also painted himself as more aggressive on the issue than Nunes, the current mayor.
“People are being attacked in broad daylight, losing their possessions and, more importantly, their tranquility,” Boulos says in one campaign advertisement. “What Sao Paulo needs is a strong mayor to do what has not been done.”
Lula has also begun to embrace the issue. The government this year drafted a proposed constitutional amendment that seeks to improve integration of security bodies and give federal authorities a more direct role in the fight against organized crime in a nation where police forces are largely controlled at the state level.
He has also proposed increased funding for the purchase of body cameras for Brazilian police, which rank among the world’s most violent: They killed more than 6,300 people in 2023, nearly triple the number from a decade prior.
But Lula’s government doesn’t plan to introduce its proposal to Congress until after the elections, and its approval is far from certain. Conservative governors like Sao Paulo’s Tarcisio de Freitas and Ronaldo Caiado in Goias, meanwhile, are focusing heavily on crime ahead of potential presidential campaigns, all but ensuring it will play a sizable role in the next election.
The current discussion is an “indication of what we will see in 2026,” Traumann said. “This is something that will be imposed on the government.”
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