Since the vast majority of people who answered the poll on my last
diary asked for more information about Brazilian politics, I'll be writing a bit more frequently about this topic.
I got some requests of topics to cover but since they are a bit complex I'll leave them to another day, today I want to tell you about a great tale of grassroots in action in a northeat capital elections we had last sunday.
Luizianne Lins, a candidate from president Lula's party that was abandoned by the national party that chose to support another candidate but who ended up beating this candidate and is now on a runoff with a rightist candidate for Fortaleza's mayorality.
The details of the story below the fold...
After winning the presidential election with Lula da Silva in 2000, PT the Workers Party, started to build a broad coalition of parties in congress. 2004 would be the first election of this coalition.
When their national committee started to pore over the major mayoral races for this cycle they had to support their allies in some of the races to get their support in the ones they where targetting for their candidates.
One of the capitals that they decided to give up was Fortaleza, capital of Ceará, one of the poor states on the northeast of the country where the big political boss is from PSDB, the party that PT sees as their biggest rivals.
They decided to support the candidate from the Comunist Party, Ignácio Arruda. A nationally known candidate from one of the small leftist parties thats has always being allied with PT. He was the candidate who was ahead in the polls by the time.
But this was not what the local party committee wanted, they didn't want to abstain to have a candidate in this race and they nominated a little known university teacher named Luizianne Lins.
The national committee thought about making an intervention on the local party committee, but since they got badly burned by a simillar intervention in Rio de Janeiro's 1998 election, they decided not to make the intervention but to put all the federal government and national party structure to help the communist candidate hoping that her challenge would only be symbolic.
Thats where things started to get interesting, even with the communist Ignácio Arruda enjoying all the help the national workers party had (including a huge concert/rally with some famous brazilian country singers) he started to slip in the polls while the little known Luizianne Lins, with the help of the local grassroots effort, started to grow on the polls.
Another funny thing is that the candidate supported by Tasso Jereisatti (the big shot political boss from PSDB) also started to slip in the polls.
With the results out yesterday, Luizianne Lins ended up with 22.3% of the votes on second place beating both the communist party candidate and the PSDB candidate. And she will now face the Moroni Torgan (26.6%) rightist candidate from PFL on the 9/31 runnoff.
This should be interesting to watch.