Brazil Municipal Elections - October 2024
An attempt to describe the national implications of an election that was not about national politics.
There were over 5,000 municipal elections in Brazil this past weekend. In attempting to make any sweeping statements about the results, there will be plenty of exceptions and outliers. With that said, here is an attempt at big picture takeaways from this weekend's election without getting into the individual races.
Anti-polarization won.
"All politics is local" is a cliche and it's absolutely accurate to describe the municipal election results across Brazil. Candidates who avoided the polarized national political debate were rewarded. Many candidates who based their campaign around the "Lula vs Bolsonaro" narrative or tried to run on national issues lost.
Candidates who identified with centrist or centrão parties were successful, with centrist referring to where politicians and parties sit on a left-right political spectrum and centrão referring to the clientelistic parties and politicians who will work with anyone across the political spectrum as long as they get a cut of the pie. Either way, the parties that did best in this election identify as one or both of those terms, with the PSD and MDB leading the way.
Given those results, you can take this one of two ways:
1) Brazilian politics is moving away from the polarization that has defined it in recent years and moving towards a more pragmatic center.
2) Local politics = local issues, but the polarization will be alive and strong when national elections are next held.
I lean towards the second point. However, if you're looking for ways that countries might escape the polarization trap, getting a strong and pragmatic (though some would argue corrupt) centrist movement that can win local elections does seem like a model that could get there.
Lula's strategic retreat benefits his political capital but harms the PT machine.
Brazil's president did not campaign hard in the local elections. The Workers' Party abandoned many races, running no candidates or weak candidates so that allies of Lula from other parties could run from a stronger position. And yet, by being selective in its campaigning, the PT did well where it did run, better than in some previous municipal elections. This means that Lula didn't lose and that some of the opportunistic allies of Lula who can help him with his agenda in 2025 won or are better placed to win in the second round. This is great news for the president's agenda next year. However, it may harm the PT in 2026 because they will not have competed for municipal positions from which to direct pork and manage party machines. Party machines that don’t exercise their political muscles atrophy. Other left and center-left parties are going to fill in the gaps.
Rightwing populism did well but the movement’s leadership is up for grabs.
Lula is the undisputed most important figure in leftwing politics in Brazil and will remain so until he hands that off or ages out. In contrast, the star quality of former President Jair Bolsonaro is diminishing.
While the center did best in this election, there are plenty of places where rightwing populists aligned with Bolsonaro won races. However, many of them did it by building up their own personal base of support or working with regional leadership, not by relying on the coattails of the former president. Where Bolsonaro actively campaigned, he mostly lost. It's possible that Bolsonaro remains the movement's leader come 2026, but in contrast to Lula, it is far from certain. There are plenty of challengers to the Bolsonaro-led populist movement. The former president's ban from political office means there are clear incentives for someone new to take over and lead nationally.
The benefits of incumbency.
Incumbent mayors did very well running for reelection or handing off power to chosen successors. They did so by running on their local records and using their local political machines. The idea that Brazil is a pro-incumbent environment, at least at the municipal level, is an interesting takeaway given that the Latin American region has generally leaned anti-incumbent in national and, to a lesser extent, local elections in recent years (with a couple of exceptions, obviously). I'm not sure what to do with this point. I think Latin America remains in an anti-incumbent environment, but this is a data point that may make me reconsider. It's worth putting a pin in it as I think about how elections will go in 2025 and 2026.