Candidates allied with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro won important victories on domingo in the legislative and gubernatorial elections held in parallel to the presidential duel in Brazil.
“Bolsonatarism can celebrate”, wrote the analyst Míriam Leitão in her column in the newspaper The globe.
At least nine former Bolsonaro ministers won at the polls.
In addition to the president and vice president of the Republic, Brazilians were called upon to elect the governors of the 27 states (including the Federal District of Brasilia), the 513 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and a third of the 81-seat Senate, as well as the state legislatures.
The Liberal Party of the head of state is heading to have the largest bench in the Chamber of Deputies, according to analysts, and in the Senate, figures from the PL and allied groups won at least 14 of the 27 seats in contention.
The new congressmen include two very controversial ex-ministers of Bolsonaro: the former head of Environment Ricardo Salles, who left the government on suspicion of corruption, and Eduardo Pazuello, criticized for his management at the head of the Health portfolio at the height of the pandemic that left almost 700,000 dead in Brazil.
Pazuello was even the deputy with the most votes in the state of Rio de Janeiro, the third most populous.
Another PL candidate, Nikolas Ferreira, was the most voted deputy in the country, with more than 1.4 million votes, at only 26 years of age.
The list of Bolsonarists for the Senate includes former soccer player Romario (re-elected) to Marcos Ponte, a former astronaut and former head of Science who unseated an ally of Lula, Márcio França, a favorite in the polls.
Three other former ministers, the ultra-conservative Damares Alves (Woman); Tereza Cristina (Agriculture) and Rogerio Marino (Development) and the current vice president were also elected to the Senate, which in 2023 must confirm two judges of the supreme court.
The former judge and former minister Sergio Moro who broke with Bolsonaro and former prosecutor Dalton Dellagnol also enter the Upper House.
Both of Lula’s arch-rivals were key figures in the “Car Wash” process, which investigated a huge system of corruption in the state-owned Petrobras. The two put Lula in jail for 19 months, but the sentence was overturned due to procedural irregularities.
Brazilians also elected the governors of the 27 states (including the Federal District of Brasilia).
Claudio Castro (PL) was elected in Rio de Janeiro, but the biggest surprise occurred in Sao Paulo, the most populous and richest state in Brazil, with the partial victory in the first round of Tarcisio Freitas, former head of Infrastructure, who appeared second in the polls .
Freitas (PL) defeated Fernando Haddad, former mayor of the Sao Paulo megalopolis and Lula’s dolphin defeated by Bolsonaro in the 2018 presidential elections, and the two will meet on October 30 in a ballot.
The elections also gave some victory to progressive causes, with the first trans federal deputies from Brazil, Erika Hilton, Duda Salabert, and Robeyoncé Lima.