Brazil’s Local Elections: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The first round of Brazil’s 2024 local elections marked a victory for democracy, as 5,569 elections were held simultaneously on October 6th. Thanks to Brazil’s renowned electronic voting system, results were posted within hours after the polls closed. This same system was the target of conspiracy theories in 2022, which fueled an attempted military coup. However, the bolsonaristas and their international allies, who accused the system of “stealing” the election two years ago, had no complaints this time, as the far-right Liberal Party (Partido Liberal/PL) rose from Brazil’s 6th to 5th largest party in mayoral politics.

In Olinda, Pernambuco Vinicius Castello (PT) surprised many by winning the first round election after polling in 3rd place during the start of the campaign season

In October 2023, I attended an internal Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores/PT) strategy meeting in Recife, led by national party president Gleisi Hoffmann. During the meeting, she outlined this year’s electoral strategy, emphasizing the need for alliances with center-right parties to increase the party’s presence in local governments they assessed as unwinnable. She predicted that the PT would increase its total number of mayors by between 50 and 80 compared to 2020. Last Sunday, the party added 56 mayors, with 12 more candidates advancing to the second round in major cities. Although the result may have disappointed some supporters, it aligned with party expectations, proving that the strategy worked.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media worked overtime to build it’s traditional “failure of the PT” narrative, despite the party moving up from 11th to 9th in the number of elected mayors (248) and increasing both its elected vice mayors (289) and city councilors (3,118) by 40%. Although some supporters grumbled about missed opportunities, there are reasons for progressives to be optimistic. As I will lay out below, there is plenty for progressives to be happy about, but there is also a need for a traditional round of self-criticism to ensure better results in the state and national elections in 2026.

The Good

As with every election since the fall of the U.S.-backed neofascist military dictatorship and Brazil’s return to democracy in 1989, the biggest winner was the opportunistic center-right. Brazil is a vast country where, for centuries, there was little contact between major cities and states. For example, São Luís, Maranhão, only built its first road connections to the rest of the country in the 1950s and historically had more contact with Portugal than with major urban areas in the Southeast, such as Rio de Janeiro. This isolation led to the establishment of powerful local political machines run by families whose wealth traces back to slavery or, in São Paulo’s case, to 19th-century industrialists. These families still control local politics today, frequently switching political parties to suit their needs. Last Sunday’s elections did nothing to alter this scenario. The only notable shift was that the Social Democratic Party (Partido Social Democrático/PSD) surpassed the Democratic Movement of Brazil (Movimento Democrático do Brasil/MDB) to become the party with the most mayors in the country, with 888.

The main difference between 2020 and 2024 is that most of these parties have switched their political allegiance from Bolsonaro to Lula’s government. Eight of the top ten parties in terms of elected mayors, all part of Lula’s broad governing coalition, have elected 4,154 mayors combined. Although the alliances of these parties and their local leaders may be fickle, this represents a significant improvement over 2020, when the center-right was almost entirely aligned with Bolsonaro.

The strategy of supporting center-right candidates paid off most significantly in Rio de Janeiro, a city of 6.2 million inhabitants that is considered the cradle of bolsonarismoas the hometown of the Bolsonaro family. Jair Bolsonaro spent more time campaigning for his former intelligence chief, Alexandre Ramagem, there than for any other candidate in the country. Nonetheless, his efforts weren’t enough to prevent a crushing defeat. In a race with nine candidates, Eduardo Paes, from the PSD, won outright with a commanding 60% of the vote. Shortly after his victory, Paes announced that he will support Lula for reelection in 2026, and it’s probable that the PT will gain control of 1-3 ministries in his new administration.

Before the elections, Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (Partido Liberal/PL) predicted it would elect 1,500 mayors. In the end, it increased its total to 523. While this is no cause for celebration among progressives, it shows that the far-right overestimated its ability to turn out the vote.

The Rise of the MST

In 2021, the Landless Rural Workers Movement (Movimento Sem Terra/MST), one of the world’s largest Marxist popular movements, announced a new strategy to establish Gramscian spaces of counter-hegemony within Brazil’s political system by systematically fielding candidates nationwide for the first time in its 37-year history. In the 2022 state and national elections, it succeeded in electing four state legislators and two federal congress members. On Sunday, the MST expanded its influence by winning 133 public offices, including 23 mayoral and vice-mayoral positions and 110 city council seats, nearly all under the PT banner. Given that the Socialism and Liberty Party (Partido Socialismo e Liberdade/PSOL) has only elected eight mayors in its 19-year history, the MST now arguably represents Brazil’s most significant radical left political force.

Indigenous Victory in Pernambuco

In Pernambuco, the Northeastern Brazilian state with the largest Indigenous population, 24 representatives from Indigenous nations were elected to city councils in nine municipalities. In a historic milestone, Chief Marcos Xukuru, leader of the second Indigenous nation to have encountered Portuguese colonists in the 1500s, was elected mayor of Pesqueira. Running on the center right Republicans (Republicanos) ticket, his new vice mayor is rural workers union leader Cilene Lima (PT). This victory overturns a 350-year-old power dynamic between the townspeople and the Xukuru, who reside in the mountains above the town.

Advances for Afro-Brazilians

The number of Afro-Brazilian mayors increased by 8% compared to 2020. Although parity has not yet been achieved in a country where 54% of the population is of African descent, starting in January 2025, Afro-Brazilians spanning the political spectrum will comprise about one-third of all mayors nationwide.

The Bad

In 2020, the PT elected mayors in four cities with populations over 400,000. Incumbents in two of these cities—Contagem and Juiz de Fora (both in Minas Gerais)—won outright in the first round by securing over 50% of the vote. Although PT candidates succeeded in the other two cities, Mauá and Diadema (both in São Paulo’s industrial ABC region, the birthplace of the PT), the runoff race in Diadema looks too close to call. While PT candidates have reached the runoff in a dozen other cities with populations over 200,000, their chances of winning are limited, with only a few promising prospects, such as Fortaleza and Olinda. Although PT has never been a major force in big-city politics, it is concerning that, with a PT president in office, greater gains haven’t been made. On a positive note, PT received the highest number of votes in the city council elections in both São Paulo and Porto Alegre.

Preliminary results suggest that, contrary to the demographic breakdown of the 2022 presidential election, the far right is gaining ground among the working class. In São Paulo, the city council candidate with the most votes is a bolsonarista who repurposed Trumpist talking points, campaigning on an anti-trans bathroom rights platform. Behind the scenes, there is significant discontent about attempts to undermine the PT from within by international NGOs, like the Ford Foundation, which are promoting a U.S. Democrat-style of bourgeois identity politics disconnected from class struggle. For a party built by labor unions and working-class social movements—two sectors of Brazilian society that tend to be socially conservative—this could be a kiss of death. The PT has traditionally championed structural changes that benefit marginalized communities without losing its core focus on the working class within those demographics. Many within the party worry that importing a class-free, US-style approach to these issues will alienate its most important support bases.

Another criticism among party members concerns the PT’s inability to adapt quickly enough to the modern workforce’s needs. In 2022, Lula campaigned on improving labor rights for gig economy workers. In 2023, after months of discussions with leaders of app-based delivery driver associations, the PT submitted a bill to Congress to compel companies like Uber to treat drivers as employees with fixed hours and benefits such as vacation and overtime pay. However, to the dismay of many association leaders, gig workers pushed back, unwilling to forfeit flexible hours, and the bill stalled in Congress. Today, influenced by microtargeted social media campaigns from the companies themselves, gig economy workers—one of the fastest-growing segments of the working class—have become some of the most conservative.

The Ugly

After Jair Bolsonaro and billionaire prosperity gospel preacher Silas Malafaia announced their support for São Paulo’s incumbent mayor Ricardo Nunes, far-right social media influencer and crypto investment coach Pablo Marçal surged in the polls, creating a rift among Bolsonaro’s supporters and causing panic in the Bolsonaro family. Marçal turned the debates into a spectacle, provoking other candidates and hamming it up for the cameras. Once arrested 20 years ago for financial fraud targeting senior citizens, Marçal accused PSOL candidate Guilherme Boulos of being a cocaine addict. In the second debate, he enraged 66-year-old José Datena, the candidate from the fading PSDB party, to the point where Datena struck him with a chair. Marçal then calmly left the debate hall, called an ambulance, and posted photos on social media, lying on a stretcher hooked up to an oxygen tank. Later, his posts from the hospital revealed him wearing a green, low-priority wristband, indicating he was likely exaggerating about “broken ribs.”

Weeks later, Marçal posted forged medical records showing Boulos hospitalized for a cocaine overdose, prompting the Supreme Court to order Instagram to deplatform him for election fraud. He circumvented the ban by creating new accounts and allegedly ran a disinformation campaign urging Boulos supporters to punch the PT’s ballot number 13 on election day. In the end, Nunes came in first by a margin of 35,000 votes, with Boulos second and Marçal a close third. It later emerged that 50,000 voters had punched 13.

The runoff elections will take place on October 27, with polls showing Boulos and his vice-mayoral candidate, former Mayor Marta Suplicy (PT), losing by double digits to Nunes. Meanwhile, Marçal’s ongoing public feuds with Malafaia and the Bolsonaro family have grown increasingly ugly. This week, he declared that if they don’t publicly apologize to him, he will support Boulos in the second round. Many of Marçal’s supporters exhibit a QAnon style of cultish hysteria and seemingly follow his every word. The conflict between Marçal and the Bolsonaros is creating a rift within the far right, leaving Bolsonaro’s sons, Eduardo and Flavio, worried about their chances of inheriting their father’s political legacy.

Boulos, who after rising in the housing movements rose to national prominence during the failed 2013 color revolution by writing Folha de São Paulo columns criticizing President Dilma Rousseff for making too many deals with conservatives, now faces the awkward task of winning over at least half of Marçal’s supporters to secure victory. Stranger things have happened in Brazilian politics, and if Boulos wins, it could be a crucial lesson for PSOL—a party with a strong internal Trotskyist current that prides itself on refusing to compromise with conservatives. With zero mayors elected so far this year, and a drop in its total number of elected city councilors from 79 to 40 nationwide, it might be the hard lesson in realpolitik that PSOL needs to evolve into a more significant player in mayoral politics.

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