LEFT-WING PARTIES scored major victories in midterm elections in Brazil and Chile on Sunday, with Brazil’s ruling Workers’ Party winning control of South America’s biggest city.
Former Brazilian education minister Fernando Haddad stormed home in a run-off round to become the new mayor of São Paulo. With eleven million inhabitants and the country’s third-biggest public budget, the city is one of the top prizes in Brazilian politics.
The victory of the little-known Mr Haddad is all the more remarkable as he started in the polls at just 3 per cent and his campaign took place against a backdrop of a major corruption trial of former senior Workers’ Party officials.
Brazil’s supreme court has convicted the accused of operating a vote-buying scheme in congress to favour the administration of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who heavily promoted Mr Haddad’s candidacy against opposition from within his own party.
In his efforts to gather votes across the political spectrum for his protege, Mr Lula even sealed a tactical alliance with the city’s widely hated former mayor Paulo Maluf, who cannot leave Brazil for fear of arrest.
He is wanted by Interpol for questioning in the US about financial crimes linked to the theft of millions of euro in public funds during his time as mayor.
Opposition candidate José Serra sought to link Mr Haddad with the Workers’ Party corruption scandals but was hampered by his alliance with the city’s outgoing mayor, Gilberto Kassab, whom polls show is one of Brazil’s most unpopular mayors and who has also faced corruption accusations as well as a disastrous handling of the city’s crack epidemic.
Mr Serra’s defeat marks the end of his Social Democratic Party’s alliance with Mr Kassab, who is now being courted by the Workers’ Party. Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff’s administration is eager to add his party’s deputies to the coalition supporting her in congress.
Sunday’s second round of voting across Brazil confirmed the significant gains made by the Workers’ Party at municipal level.
Though it only came third in the number of municipalities won, for the first time more Brazilians – some 37 million – will live under Workers’ Party mayors than any other party.
The left also made major gains in local elections in Chile, strengthening the likelihood that the centre-left Concertación alliance will recapture the presidency in next year’s general election.
Among Sunday’s victors was Maya Fernández Allende (41), the granddaughter of Salvador Allende, the world’s first democratically elected Marxist president, who was overthrown by Gen Augusto Pinochet in a bloody coup in 1973.
Ms Fernández Allende was raised in Cuba after her grandfather took his own life while Pinochet’s forces bombarded his presidential palace. She was elected mayor of the Ñuñoa district of the capital Santiago, where she defeated the incumbent ally of the country’s right-wing president, Sebastián Piñera.
Most significantly, Mr Piñera’s right-wing coalition lost control of Santiago’s city hall to the Concertación’s Carolina Tohá, whose father was Allende’s vice-president and who died in military custody in 1974. The Pinochet regime said he took his own life but it is widely believed he was murdered after months of torture.
