(Bloomberg) -- Candidates backed by Jair Bolsonaro are pulling ahead in municipal elections that are considered a barometer of political sentiment in Brazil, two years before a presidential vote in which Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will likely seek another term.
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The conservative former president, who’s banned from seeking public office until 2030, helped elect on Sunday the mayors of four of the country’s 27 state capitals. He supports a further 14 candidates who are competing in a second-round vote set for Oct. 27.
Candidates supported by Lula won in two capitals, Rio de Janeiro and Recife, although both were incumbents with high approval ratings and the president did not play an active role in either race. Contenders backed by Lula will compete in four more — all of them against Bolsonaro representatives.
Across the country, Brazilians elected 5,518 mayors Sunday and will have to return to the ballot box in three weeks to pick an additional 51 in cities where no candidate received more than 50% of the votes. So far, most winners lean center-right.
It was the latest strong performance for the Brazilian right, which made gains in congress two years ago even as it lost the presidency. Now it will aim to build on the success in 2026, when it will seek to topple Lula and gain majority control of the Senate, potentially allowing it to push for the impeachment of Supreme Court justices and advance major legislative priorities.
At the same time, the races exposed fractures in a right-wing movement that is still plotting its path forward after Bolsonaro’s ban.
In Sao Paulo, center-right incumbent Ricardo Nunes, who had Bolsonaro’s backing, advanced to a runoff against Guilherme Boulos, the leftist Lula endorsed. Both obtained nearly one-third of the ballots in the first round of an election upset by the emergence of an unpredictable right-wing contestant.
Pablo Marcal, who finished third just behind the leaders, split Bolsonaro’s electorate with a campaign that leaned on the social media tactics the former president used in his races.
Despite his narrow loss, Marcal’s success has positioned him as a national figure ahead of the 2026 contest, while raising questions about Bolsonaro’s power to dictate the future of his movement.
“The emergence of Pablo Marcal undermines his hegemony as a right-wing influencer and reinforces the challenge for the group’s candidacy in 2026,” the political analysis team at XP wrote about Bolsonaro in a note.
But Nunes’s ability to hold off Marcal’s surge may also provide a boost to Tarcisio de Freitas, the center-right Sao Paulo governor who is widely considered a potential Bolsonaro heir in the presidential race. Freitas threw his weight behind Nunes even as Bolsonaro remained more hesitant to fully enter the race, and a second-round victory could bolster his position ahead of the the 2026 campaign.
“Nunes, if reelected, will be an important ally for the governor in his 2026 plans, whatever they may be,” XP said.
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