The first round of local elections in Brazil are tomorrow. Hundreds of thousands of candidates are running for over 60,000 different elected positions. Bolsonaro, having failed to register his new party, has only been doing limited online campaigning for a handful of candidates.

He mostly just endorses people through Facebook posts and videos where he lists mayoral and council candidates. Not on the ground, not doing any real organizing.

The two main candidates backed by the Bolsonaros are Marcelo Crivella in Rio and Celso Russomanno in São Paulo, both of the evangelical Republicanos party. Both are very likely to lose to more moderate centre-right candidates.

In fact, most other Bolsonaro-backed candidates will also likely lose, despite doing everything they can to attach their brand to him. But it’s not going to matter much for him—because he’s been pretty removed the election won’t serve as much of a referendum on him.

Local politics is a whole different sphere and is even more dominated by nebulous pork-barrel centre-right parties than national politics. There are weird alliances and everything is about getting attention, and ideology matters very little especially the smaller the municipality

So Bolsonaro won’t win but he won’t lose either. But who will be the winners? The PT is looking likely to make a comeback. The 2016 local elections came at a low point for the party. They came 10th in terms of number of elected mayors and won only 1 of the 100 largest cities.

Now PT is targeting several large and capital cities and is on course to make some gains. They’re in contention for 12 of the largest cities and have a clear lead in 6 of those. PT are one of the few parties where people vote *for the party* and they need to win back their base.

PT actually leads in voting intention by party in every region of the country, but only a small number of people know the party they’re voting for. For many voters going for a right wing party they just know the candidate and their number. https://revistaforum.com.br/pesquisaforum/pesquisa-forum-pt-e-psol-lideram-preferencia-de-votacao-no-nordeste-e-sudeste/

Very likely to be the relative losers of the election are MDB and PSDB, the traditional main parties of the centre-right. They came out on top in 2016 but suffered bad losses in the 2018 elections. Theyll remain as some of the largest parties after tomorrow but it will be reduced

Picking up the slack will probably be the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and Progressistas (PP), two corrupt, pork-barrel parties that are able to succeed because they fly under people’s radars. They don’t even register in the party poll even though they’ll win a lot of mayors.

These parties might be worth keeping an eye on in the future as new power brokers in the Brazilian political landscape.

On a smaller scale you’ll also see improvements from parties like the libertarian NOVO and the right wing Podemos (running several Bolsonaro-endorses candidates), which have increased their profiles recently.

Leftist PSOL will also do well, and their candidate Guilherme Boulos in São Paulo will probably pull off a strong result even if he’s unlikely to win. With the backing of PT they will probably win Belém, the capital of Pará, with Edmilson Rodrigues, their first major city pickup.

These are the projected results in the municipalities in the greater São Paulo metropolitan area. The PSDB will likely win most of it, as usual.

Here are the mayors of the state capitals in order of their likelihood to win re-election, and in the other image, which parties are likely to win those cities.