Yesterday we had local elections here in Brazil, the first since Lula da Silva was elected president.
The results were a bit mixed with some great successes for Lula's Workers Party but also some tought runnoffs still to be disputed on 9/31, specially in the city of São Paulo.
From the LA Times:
RIO DE JANEIRO -- Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's left-leaning Workers' Party posted significant wins in nationwide municipal elections Sunday and expanded its reach into this country's mammoth interior.
...
Up for grabs were the mayoralties of all of Brazil's 5,500 municipalities, from tiny towns in the rainforest to some of the world's most populous cities, including Rio de Janeiro. With most of the vote counted Sunday night, the Workers' Party, or PT, looked poised to make sizable gains in the number of its mayors, possibly even doubling the pre-vote tally of 190.
However, races in several big cities were headed for runoffs Oct. 31, including in Sao Paulo, South America's most populous city. There, after a bitter campaign that set spending records for a local election in Brazil, incumbent Marta Suplicy of the Workers' Party will square off with former Health Minister Jose Serra, who lost the presidential race to Lula in 2002.
Its hard to find good sources in english, bellow the fold I'll give you some analysis based on Portuguese papers and websites.
Let me try to give you guys some background and tell you a bit what all this means.
First of all its important to understand that most american democrats would be considered on the right of the brazilian political spectrum, as a matter of fact Liberal is a name that the left likes to use for the right.
Here is an overview of the major parties before spelling out the results:
PT - Workers Party - President Lula da Silva's Party, its a leftist labour originated party with strong ties to the socialist movement. PT has always been a radical left party until 2002 elections when they moved to the center and managed to win the election. Up to now on the government, PT implemented a fiscal conservative economic policy. It's very strong in São Paulo where it has its origins in 80's labour movement.
PSDB - Social Democratic Party - Its the party of former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Its a center-left party in the european tradition. Its also very strong in São Paulo and it has lots of liberal intelectuals. It was a spinof from the old PMDB, where the left-leaning intelectuals couldn't stand the corrupt leadership who had taken over the party in the mid-eighties.
PMDB - The Brazilian Democratic Movement Party - Its a large centrist party without much ideology, it was the only allowed oposition party during the 20 years of military rule, very strong in the interior of Brazil but it has been loosing strenght and credibility in the last ten years mostly because of old politcal dirty tricks and lots of old style bosses.
PFL - The Liberal Front Party - The rightist party, mostly run by old local bosses, very strong in the northeast of Brazil. Its not a radical winger party, its more like the business/agricultural side of the Republican Party.
Besides these 4 we have a lot of medium to small sized parties, some very ideological (going from old time comunist to radical right wingers and a few that we call rent-a-party where anyone with enough money can be a candidate.
As for the results:
PT, Lula's Party got some strong showings. They already won on six capitals (Belo Horizonte, Recife, Aracaju, Palmas, Macapá and Rio Branco) and will face a runoff in 9 others (Porto Alegre, Goiânia, São Paulo, Fortaleza, Curitiba, Cuiabá, Vitória, Porto Velho and Belém).
Even though they won in almost twice more towns than in 2000 they only had a small increase in the total votes won (14.3 million against 12 million in 2000). They won in more places but they lost votes on the main centers.
PSDB turned out the second vote getter with 13.5 million votes (100.000 less than in 2000). PMDB still is the party with the most mayors (already won in 1027 towns) got 12.2 million (1 million less than in 2000) votes and PFL got 9.6 million votes (down from 12.9 in 2000). The smaller parties won some votes also.
Where do we stand?
PT had a good election, but not as good as they hoped for, in the beginning of the campaign they were talking about winning in 5 times more places than they had in 2000, they didn't even double it. But it was a great result specially because they had a better than expected results in some capitals.
But in São Paulo they got a suprisingly bad result, they were expecting a pretty close race with their candidate Marta Suplicy which is running for reelection against PSDBs José Serra, who was Lula's opponent on 2002 presidential elections. She ended up more than 8 points behind, and he is running almost 20 points ahead in the 9/31 runoff polls.
This is a very important race for both parties because São Paulo is not only Brazil's largest city but also its where both PT and PSDB are based and where most of their big shots will be candidates in 2006 elections.
In Rio de Janeiro we had a diferent dinamic working. We have been having a surge of populism mixed with religion from and adventurous former governor (Anthony Garotinho from PMDB) who wants to run for president and whose wife is the current governor. Cesar Maia, from the rightist PFL got reelected with a very stong showing and Garotinho's candidates lost in most of the major cities and towns in the states. But they won in more than 70% of the small state towns, a bit under their 80% goal. But with Cesar Maia's strong finish and their losses in a few other main cities in the state probably dealt a cripplig blow to his aspirations.
As for the rest of PFL, they lost on most of their Northeast enclaves and the party is in shambles, the next few months will show us if the party can be rebuilt or if it'll get blown apart with part of it going to support Lula's Government and the other allying itself with PSDB to make a strong challenge for Lula.
As for PMDB the party will probably stay in its amorphous form with some politicians supporting Lula while others opposing him. The most direct result of the election is that probably Garotinho won't be able to get the presidential nomination from PMDB and will have to jump to a smaller party to fulfill his political goals.
Now eyes are on the 9/31 runnof and after that every pundit will be talking about the cabinet shuffle that will probably take place early next year to acommodate the new coalition and to begin to wonder about the 2006 presidential elections.