São Paulo, Brazil, Oct 27 (EFE).- The mayor of São Paulo, Brazil’s most populous city, Ricardo Nunes, was re-elected Sunday in the country’s most important municipal election with 59.49% of the vote against 40.51% for leftist Guilherme Boulos.
Nunes, of the center-right Brazilian Democratic Movement (Movimiento Democrático Brasileño, MDB), won with a difference of more than one million votes, according to the results released by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal after more than 95% of the votes were counted.
With this overwhelming victory, this politician ratified the position he has held for almost three and a half years, after assuming the post following the death of Mayor Bruno Covas from cancer in 2021.
The result gives a boost to the ultra-right former president Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022), who had supported the mayor, albeit timidly.
At the same time, the defeat of Boulos, of the Socialism and Liberty Party (Partido Socialismo e Liberdade, PSOL), is a setback for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who publicly and notoriously supported the candidate and attended several campaign events at his side.
The results confirmed polls that showed the incumbent mayor as the favorite, despite a recent blackout that left 3.1 million people without electricity.
Boulos was weighed down by his past as an activist, considered too radical by some voters, as well as a series of hoaxes perpetrated against him by the right wing.
Shortly after the polls opened, São Paulo state governor Tarcísio de Freitas, an ally of Nunes, claimed without evidence that Brazil’s largest criminal group, the Capital’s First Command, had issued a call to vote for Boulos.
The leftist candidate called the statement «a lie» and filed a complaint with the Electoral Tribunal.
São Paulo, with 12 million inhabitants excluding the metropolitan region, was the main political battle in the second round of municipal elections held across Brazil on Sunday and was seen as a thermometer to gauge the comparative power of Bolsonaro and Lula.
Some 33 million Brazilian voters were called to the polls on Sunday to elect 51 mayors of major cities, following a first round earlier this month.EFE
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