Brazil: Lula's Workers' Party loses all of its mayoral runoff bids

The runoff of the mayoral elections on Sunday (Oct. 30) has seen the waning of Workers' Party (PT) and a growth of the PSDB, its biggest adversary in the past 15 years.

The performance of the party of Brazil's two latest former presidents, Lula and Rousseff, in the runoff, has been in keeping with the downward trend observed in the first round of this election. The party has not succeeded in electing any of its seven candidates that ran on Sunday. Even in Santo André, São Bernardo, and São Caetano, a region in the São Paulo metropolitan area known as the ABC, where the Workers' Party was born, none of its candidates won.

The only state capital where the Workers' Party made it to the second round was Recife, Pernambuco. Even there, the current mayor Geraldo Júlio of the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB) defeated the PT's João Paulo by a large margin—nearly 200,000 votes.

PSDB

On the other hand, the PSDB has won in 14 of the 19 cities where it ran in the second round. The tucanos—as its members are called in a reference to the party's symbol, a toucan—competed in eight state capitals, winning in five of them: Porto Alegre (Rio Grande do Sul), Belém (Pará), Maceió (Alagoas), Porto Velho (Rondônia), and Manaus (Amazonas).

Despite a defeat in Belo Horizonte (Minas Gerais)—the constituency of Senator Aécio Neves, president of the party and former presidential hopeful—the tucanos had victories in the very ABC region. In São Bernardo do Campo, the city of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the PSDB's Orlando Morando won by 59% of the vote. In Santo André, another tucano, Paulo Serra, had 78% of the vote, while the Workers' Party's Carlos Grana got only 21%. The PSDB also won in Ribeirão Preto, the home town of Antonio Palocci, a former Chief of Staff under the Workers' Party.

PMDB

The PMDB, Brazil's largest party, won in three of the six state capitals where it ran—Goiânia (Goiás), Florianópolis (Santa Catarina), and Cuiabá (Mato Grosso). In total, the party secured a winning tally in eight of the 15 cities it competed in the second round. In Macapá, Amapá—the constituency of José Sarney, Brazil's former president and one of the main leaders of the PMDB—the party was defeated by the candidate of the Sustainability Network (REDE), a party founded by Marina Silva, a former minister under Lula's presidential administration that ran for president in 2014.

Comparison with 2012

In 2012, halfway into former president Dilma Rousseff's first term of office, the Workers' Party's performance was very superior to this year's—630 mayors were elected in the first round that year, and eight won in the runoff. The most significant victory back then was Fernando Haddad's in São Paulo. This year, Haddad ran for re-election, but lost in the first round to the PSDB's João Doria. In total, the Workers' Party secured only 256 victories in the first round, and lost in the seven cities it competed for in the runoff.

Improving on its performance from 2012, when it elected 686 mayors in the first round and eight in the runoff, the PSDB this year elected 793 maiors in the first round, in addition to the other 14 in the runoff.

In 2012, the PMDB elected 1,015 candidates in the first round, plus six in the second round. This year, the party elected 1,028 mayors in the first round, plus eight in the runoff.

Translated by Mayra Borges