|
 A day after Sunday's municipal election, Brazilian President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, called for national union and promised to work with the winning mayors and city councilors no matter what party they belong to.
"Mayors play a leading role and I'm not interested in knowing to which political party they belong, I only want to know who is the mayor because he has the same responsibility as I do in helping to solve people's problems," said Lula during his weekly radio program "Breakfast with the President".
On Sunday there was an only winner, "the Brazilian people who freely elected their candidates," underlined the president.
Lula, who is riding on a popularity rating close to 80%, recalled that during the electoral campaign, "not one single candidate criticized me" and they all underlined the good relations between the federal government and local town halls.
"I'm convinced this association will be even closer." he emphasized.
However the big cooperation test will be in São Paulo where conservative incumbent Gilberto Kassab defeated with 60.7% of the votes Lula's Workers' Party candidate Martha Suplicy who only managed 39.3% in the Sunday run off.
Kassab two great allies in the victory were former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and current São Paulo governor José Serra, virtually the conservative presidential hopeful for 2010.
This was particularly difficult for Lula da Silva since he only campaigned strongly for Ms Suplicy in São Paulo.
In Rio do Janeiro, which together with São Paulo and Belo Horizonte are the core of political and economic power in Brazil, Eduardo Paes from the centrist party Brazilian Democratic Movement, PMDB, and a coalition ally of Lula, narrowly defeated the "green party" candidate Fernando Gabeira.
However in Belo Horizonte, the Workers' Party and conservatives managed to share victory with Mário Lacerda. He garnered 59.1% of the vote and Leonardo Quintão from PMDB, 40.9% in the run off.
The Workers' Party also suffered another two major setbacks. In Porto Alegre, capital of Rio Grande do Sul, the incumbent Jose Fogaça from the PMDB defeated overwhelmingly Lula's candidate Maria do Rosário.
In Salvador, Bahia, the incumbent mayor João Henrique from the PMDB retained Town Hall defeating the Workers' Party Walter Pinheiro.
Overall next January the Workers Party will take control of 554 cities, of which six are state capitals, with the big loss of São Paulo.
Conservative PSDB emerged with 778 cities, three state capitals and with Kassab overwhelming re-election victory in São Paulo.
The Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, PMDB, won in 1,205 mayoral races, including five state capitals, a 14% jump.
In practical terms this means that the ruling coalition has won nearly two-thirds (63%) of the mayoral races in Sunday's elections.
Mercopress
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.