There will be runoff elections for the office of mayor in Brazil’s two largest cities. In local elections yesterday, neither Sao Paulo nor Rio de Janeiro came up with a candidate with more than 50 percent of the vote.
In Rio, after counting all the votes, the Olympic Mayor Eduardo Paes, who was accused of corruption, was ahead of incumbent Marcelo Crivella, an evangelical pastor and ally of the far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, with 37 to 21.9 percent.
In Sao Paulo, the candidate Celso Russomano, supported by Bolsonaro, landed behind in fourth place. There, in the runoff election on November 29, the Social Democratic Mayor Bruno Covas will run against Guilherme Boulos from the Socialist Party. Also in Fortaleza, the fourth largest city in the South American country, the mayoral election is going into a second round.
The allegations against Paes include irregularities in the construction of a sports facility for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. The conservative 51-year-old was mayor there from 2009 to 2016. Overall, offices in all of the country’s 5,500 municipalities were voted on yesterday.
