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Brazil's Largest City May Soon Have a Socialist Mayor
BY HUGO ALBUQUERQUE
Brazil is still dominated by Jair Bolsonaro’s unhinged reactionary politics. Which makes it all the more incredible that the leftist housing organizer Guilherme Boulos recently defied all expectations by making it to a runoff in São Paulo’s upcoming mayoral election.
On November 15, housing rights activist and rising star of the Brazilian left Guilherme Boulos made it into the runoff elections for the mayorship of São Paulo — the largest city in all the Americas and the financial center of Brazil. A member of the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), Boulos ran alongside vice mayoral candidate Luiza Erundina, a veteran socialist who in the 1980s served as the first woman mayor of São Paulo.
With scant resources and electoral rules stacked against his party, Boulos defeated the Bolsonaro-backed far-right candidate Celso Russomanno to the second-place spot. That upset also means that the runoff election will take a sharp leftward turn, leaving out the influential Jilmar Tatto from the more social-democratic Workers’ Party (PT).
The conclusions to be drawn from Boulos’s victory are several. For one, it proved that a radical left-wing platform could overtake far-right forces both on social media and in the streets. Just as importantly, Boulos’s success suggests that the old pro-Lula / anti-Lula dichotomy that has so divided the Brazilian left in recent years may finally be drawing to a close.
Regardless of whether Boulos can clinch the November 29 runoff elections, when he will square off with the center-right Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) candidate Bruno Covas, his campaign has been an unqualified success. It has shifted the tectonic plates of Brazilian politics and put forward a strategic, technological, and ideological alternative that could very well pave the way forward for the Brazilian left.
More:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/11/brazil-runoff-elections-guilherme-boulos-psol-pt-lula
Very helpful background in article.
