center-right gains strength and challenges PT and center-left

Last Sunday’s municipal elections (6) in Brazil’s main capitals resulted in the consolidation of the center-right in the country.

This shift to the right in large urban centers, in many cases with moderate approaches, has been occurring since before the 2022 election, which elected Lula for a third presidential term.

“Bolsonaro’s camp is much stronger. The tendency is for the right to have more city halls, and more city halls is a vote multiplier”, says André Rosa, professor of political science at the UDF University of Brasília, cited by France-Presse.

The Lula-Bolsonaro polarization, through its candidates for mayor in the country, anticipates signs about the possible composition of presidential candidacies for 2026. For now, it is only known that the former president was declared ineligible by the courts until 2030 for attacking the electoral system without evidence, and that Lula has not yet said whether he will seek re-election.

Lula saw this conservative national phenomenon in the October 2020 elections and built a coalition of centrists, displacing the old left from the founding stage of the PT, and adding center-right figures.

With this strategy, he intended to seduce the broad middle class, which determines elections and currently leans towards conservative positions. A more detailed analysis shows that not only is the country pivoting toward the center, but that this process is moving all leadership toward the center.

This transformation practically dissolved the classical Brazilian left, although some minority groups still resist this change, including in the PT.

There is another dimension in evaluating the meaning of the result of the first round of these elections and what the definitions promise, in the second round, on the 27th of this month. The Executive did not have the power to reduce the virtual cohabitation with the right that controls Congress.

In the 2022 elections, despite Bolsonaro’s defeat to Lula, the PL managed to build the largest bloc of legislators – 99 of the 513 seats – in 25 years in the decisive Chamber of Deputies. This bloc works in alliance with a powerful universe of parties across this political spectrum.

The government needed to show strength to interfere in this design and, particularly, to advance in its fight against the distortion that consists of the fact that Congress controls a part of the budget that is secret, a concession made by former president Bolsonaro to avoid his impeachment. None of this appears to have been resolved yet. Quite the opposite.