On Sunday, Oct. 27, São Paulo Mayor Ricardo Nunes sailed to a second term with nearly 60 percent of the vote, prevailing over his left-wing challenger, Guilherme Boulos. Nunes was supported by the conservative former president Jair Bolsonaro, but he won by staking out moderate positions and assembling a broad-based coalition. São Paulo is Latin America’s most populous metropolis and an important proving ground for Brazilian national politics. That suggests that Nunes’s victory holds important lessons for the trajectory of the nation, whose political order has undergone a drastic transformation over the past decade.
“São Paulo is ... an important proving ground for national politics.”
Since the restoration of representative democracy in 1988, Brazil has had two major national parties: current President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva’s Workers Party (PT), and the Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB) of former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Both parties made it into the second-round presidential elections between 1994 and 2014. Before Bolsonaro’s rise in 2018, to be a right-winger meant to be anti-PT and, therefore, to vote for the PSDB, which was founded (as its name suggests) as a center-left social-democratic party.
Both parties emerged in São Paulo under Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985)—and more precisely, from the University of São Paulo. Although Lula was born in Pernambuco, he was raised in São Paulo and anointed by the city’s left-wing intellectuals as the workers’ political champion. As for the USP-educated sociologist Cardoso, the military obliged him to retire prematurely on the grounds that he was a communist, but in the 1990s, he became Brazil’s embodiment of Third Way politics. He made his reputation by implementing a neoliberal solution to the problem of hyperinflation while serving as finance minister in 1994.
Americans may wonder how Brazil could polarize between two ostensibly left-of-center parties. The answer is quite simple: The long-reigning Brazilian uniparty was neoliberal, with a progressive flavor.
The PT is a heterogeneous formation uniting left-wing Catholics, old-school Stalinists, Trotskyists, and progressive academics. The continued presence of radicals in the PT—as when party leaders were friendly with Hugo Chávez during Lula’s first two terms in office—allowed Cardoso to create the impression that Lula represented a major break from the PSDB administrations that preceded him. But both were neoliberal administrations. The architects of Lula’s most famous social initiative, the Bolsa Família cash assistance program, were inspired by Milton Friedman’s idea of negative income tax, and in any case Cardoso, who was president between 1995 and 2003, had also created social programs for low-income people.
Under both men, Brazil lost much of its industrial base and sold off state companies, while mitigating the downsides of these moves by offering subsidies to the poor. In general, right-wing administrations sold off the companies, and PT leaders haven’t bought them back. PSDB privatized public services by subcontracting to philanthropic organizations, or hiring temporary workers, or transferring money into private enterprises; Lula largely continued these trends.
Beyond the two main national parties that have alternated in the presidency, Brazilian politics at the congressional level has long been dominated by the so-called “Centrão” (Big Center), a collection of transactional parties. To the extent they have an ideology, it consists of securing earmarks in Brasília to spend it on their voters through local political machines. The oldest of these parties is the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), which sprang up as the official opposition party under military rule. Brazil’s first democratically elected president after the dictatorship, José Sarney, was from the MDB; it subsequently evolved into the party of regional oligarchies. Unlike its neighbors, whose populations are often concentrated in the capital, Brazil, like the United States, hosts a number of large cities, mostly dispersed along its coast.
The megalopolis of São Paulo has long served as a laboratory for national politics, given that it has traditionally elected mayors from the PT or PSDB. But the polarization of Brazilian presidential politics between the PT and PSDB died in 2018, when Bolsonaro won the presidency on an outsider, anti-establishment platform. The PSDB’s national relevance came to an end, and “Bolsonarismo” became the node of right-wing opposition to the PT.
Novo, the only ideological party of the right, is a tropical National Review-fusionist party of sorts, committed among other things to defending the First Amendment—despite Brazil not having one. In Brazil, creating a new political party is a laborious task, and Bolsonarismo is disorganized, to say the least, so Bolsonaro instead used an existing party to host his movement: the misleadingly named Liberal Party (PL), originally a Centrão component. Since 2022, Bolsonaro and PL leader Valdemar da Costa Neto have disputed the leadership of the party. Bolsonaro has the votes, but Valdemar has “the machine,” as Brazilians say. Unsurprisingly, many right-wingers have begun to accuse Bolsonaro of selling out to the Centrão and the political establishment.
In 2022, Bolsonarismo’s greatest success was the election of Tarcísio de Freitas as governor of São Paulo state, ending 20 years of rule by the PSDB. Tarcísio, a member of the Centrão party Republicanos, was infrastructure minister in Bolsonaro’s administration. What made the São Paulo mayoral election unpredictable was the fact that for the first time, the PT didn’t launch a candidate. Instead, the party supported Guilherme Boulos of the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), known for for woke cultural stances such as the promotion of gender-neutral language
Bolsonaro wanted to run his controversial former environment minister Ricardo Salles, but Valdemar refused and instead persuaded Bolsonaro to support São Paulo’s incumbent mayor Ricardo Nunes, a typical Centrão politician who became mayor after his predecessor died in office. Angered by Bolsonaro’s betrayal, die-hard conservatives launched the internet coach and shady businessman Pablo Marçal to run as an anti-establishment candidate against Nunes.
The mayoral contest was a wacky race. Marçal called the PSDB candidate Datena a rapist during a debate; Datena, an older television host, proceeded to hurl a chair at Marçal on live television. Marçal also claimed he would air a hitherto unknown scandal about Boulos. Eventually, he released a fake medical report on Instagram claiming that Boulos had a psychotic break due to cocaine use. Governor Tarcísio went as far as to say that if Brazil were a serious country, Marçal would be in jail. As it turns out, when he was 18 years old, Marçal robbed banks for an evangelical pastor’s gang that was eventually busted by Federal Police. Marçal was found guilty, but he appealed until the crime exceeded its statute of limitations. It is shocking, therefore, that he almost reached Sunday’s second round. The results of the first round saw Nunes with 29.48 percent of votes, Boulos with 29.07 percent, and Marçal with 28.14 percent.
Boulos hoped to dispute the second round with Marçal, given that both have high disapproval ratings. Nunes supporters feared that he wouldn’t make it to the second round, but once he did, politicians immediately started to negotiate positions in his future administration. After the runoff, two factors pointed to a split in the coalitions. One was a strange and embarrassing “job interview” between Boulos and Marçal. After a campaign in which one had treated the other as a criminal, they suddenly acted like old friends. In internet memes, the encounter was depicted as a scene from Brokeback Mountain.
Soon after, two filmmakers—the right-wing Josias Teófilo and left-wing Newton Cannito—organized a lavish dinner, inviting artists and politicians to support Nunes and to demand the de-wokification of municipal cultural policies. They criticized, for instance, the reservation of vacancies for transgender and black people at SP Cine, the public cinema promotion agency. (Because Brazilians are of mixed ethnic backgrounds, the implementation of these set-asides also involves a racial tribunal, which determines whether someone is black enough to be entitled to special treatment.) Former President Michel Temer is the craftsman of this unusual alliance, which includes other anti-woke left-wingers, including the politician Aldo Rebelo, who served as a minister in both Lula’s and Dilma Rousseff’s governments.
Boulos tried to distance himself from some of his party’s cultural stances. For instance, during a campaign rally, a singer performed Brazil’s anthem in gender-neutral language, leading to widespread ridicule online; in response, Boulos’s campaign deleted the video. That said, PSOL is currently threatening to go to the Supreme Court if lawmakers in the state of Minas Gerais approve a ban on the use of gender-neutral language in schools.
Across Brazil, this and other municipal elections are showing that Brazil’s neoliberal left is in decline, even if Lula remains relatively popular. In this context, the Centrão is a growing force, and Nunes’s win in São Paulo showed that a heterogeneous, un-woke centrist coalition offers a path for victory.
But on economic and infrastructural issues, what this shift portends is less clear. During the mayoral election cycle, blackouts hit São Paulo, a situation blamed on Enel, the Italian energy company that runs the electrical grid. In response, Boulos’s supporters claimed that he would buy back São Paulo’s electricity company. But it soon emerged that Lula had already declared that he would respect existing contracts, and that Enel would have its contract renewed in 2028. The emerging centrist coalition may be able to steer Brazil away from the cultural extremes of Bolsonarismo and woke progressivism, but whether it can offer solutions to the crises created by decades of neoliberal policy remains an open question.