This Sunday the governors of São Paulo and other crucial states were also elected in the second round.
The second round of the elections in Brazil had a well-defined correlate in the territorial control of the country. While the northeast gave victory to former president Lula da Silva, the current head of state, Jair Bolsonaro, stayed with some key governments in the southeast.
Twelve were the governors elected in the second round this Sunday out of a total of 27 for all of Brazil.
Fifteen state leaders had been elected in the first round, of which nine supported Bolsonaro and the other five leaned toward Lula da Silva’s Workers’ Party (PT).
In the first case, it is the States of Santa Catarina, Mato Grosso, Acre, Roraima, the federal district of Brasilia, Tocatins, Amapá, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro, the latter two of the most important constituencies in Brazil.
On the contrary, in the first turn they had been left for the PT Rio Grande do Norte, Piauí, Ceará, Maranhao and Pará, with Herder Barbalho, who is part of the center-right party of Senator Simone Tebet, who supports the PT.
A Bolsonarista in São Paulo
In the second round, the spotlights were on San Pablo, where the Bolsonarista Tarcisio de Freitas prevailed over Fernando Haddad, of the PT.
São Paulo is the most populous state in Brazil, with 46 million inhabitants, it generates a third of the country’s wealth and was the scene of a iron dispute.
In the other two state districts that follow in importance, those of Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro, their governors were re-elected on October 2, Romeu Zema and Claudio Castro. They are both Bolsonaristas.
For the first time since 1994 São Paulo will not have a governor from the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) to which the current president Rodrigo García belongs, who came third in the first round and decided, against the opinion of the party, the “unconditional” support for Freitas and President Bolsonaro.
This means that a candidate associated with the Bolsonarista extreme right will have to govern the financial, industrial and scientific bastion of Brazil, which also has the main public universities in the country, the University of Sao Paulo (USP) and the University of Campinas (Unicamp), dependent on the regional state.
In the first round, former Bolsonarian Infrastructure Minister Freitas, of the Republican Party, linked to the Universal Church, had defeated Haddad, former Education Minister of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and former mayor of San Pablo, by 42% to 35%.
Haddad was the PT’s candidate in 2018 in the election that Bolsonaro won when Lula was banned for a prison sentence for Operation Lava Jato, which was later annulled by the Supreme Court.
Bolsonaro managed to impose Freitas in São Paulo despite the fact that he is a native of Rio de Janeiro and promises a privatization agenda that would include the giant Sabesp, the largest water and sewage company in Brazil.
Among the other states that went to the ballot are Bahía, a central district for tourism and the fifth state in the country, where Jerónimo Rodríguez, of the PT, won, postponing the conservative Antonio Magalhaes Neto, a member of an old regional dynasty and who competed for the Union party.
A separate case is Pernambuco, Lula’s native region, where center-leftist Raquel Lyra, of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party, triumphed over Marina Arraes, of the Solidarity party.
Arraes broke with the PT and the Brazilian Socialist Party, although he has the support of the Lulista arch. None vindicates Bolsonaro for the high rejection in the northeast of the presidential figure.
With 18 governors re-elected, in this election Brazil achieved its record for re-elections since 1998. In six states – Espírito Santo, Paraíba, Rio Grande do Sul, Amazonas, Alagoas and Rondônia – victories were recorded for their current governors.
Source: Clarín agencies and newsroom