By Hugo Albuquerque
On November 15, housing rights activist and rising star of the Brazilian left Guilherme Boulos made it into the runoff elections for the mayorship of São Paulo — the largest city in all the Americas and the financial center of Brazil. A member of the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), Boulos ran alongside vice mayoral candidate Luiza Erundina, a veteran socialist who in the 1980s served as the first woman mayor of São Paulo.
With scant resources and electoral rules stacked against his party, Boulos defeated the Bolsonaro-backed far-right candidate Celso Russomanno to the second-place spot. That upset also means that the runoff election will take a sharp leftward turn, leaving out the influential Jilmar Tatto from the more social-democratic Workers’ Party (PT).
The conclusions to be drawn from Boulos’s victory are several. For one, it proved that a radical left-wing platform could overtake far-right forces both on social media and in the streets. Just as importantly, Boulos’s success suggests that the old pro-Lula / anti-Lula dichotomy that has so divided the Brazilian left in recent years may finally be drawing to a close.
Regardless of whether Boulos can clinch the November 29 runoff elections, when he will square off with the center-right Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) candidate Bruno Covas, his campaign has been an unqualified success. It has shifted the tectonic plates of Brazilian politics and put forward a strategic, technological, and ideological alternative that could very well pave the way forward for the Brazilian lef
Still not yet forty years of age, Boulos is a rising star in Brazilian politics. He first gained fame in 2003 when, as a leader in the Homeless Workers’ Movement (MTST), he occupied an abandoned site owned by Volkswagen in the iconic São Bernardo do Campo industrial district of São Paulo. It was there too that ex-president LuizInácio Lula da Silva first wrote his name in the history books as the leader of the mass strikes that brought down the Brazilian military dictatorship in 1985.
The boldness of Boulos’s action — at a time when Lula had already come to power and was celebrated among workers — launched him into the limelight and toward the center of a political current that was still in its earliest stages of development: the left-wing opposition to the PT government.
Several years later, a group of so-called PT radicals — soon to be founders of PSOL — were expelled from Lula’s party, and social movements were becoming more vocal in their criticism of the PT administration. Boulos secured his reputation, not only for his work on the housing crisis, but also on the increasingly serious matter of Brazil’s budget deficit (which remains a problem to this day).
The PT administration brought significant progress to Brazil, but Boulos continued to point out that millions of Brazilians, roughly 15 percent of the population, still had no housing and so were forced to live on the streets or in temporary, precarious arrangements in large urban centers. The demand for housing was Boulos’s calling card, and with it he led countless occupations of abandoned buildings in protest for public housing.
Boulos’s star continued to rise when millions of Brazilians took to the streets in 2013–14. The MTST, by then a well-established and organized movement, was one of the few social movements that managed to mobilize large numbers of people to join in the protests, and in addition, one of the few that actively began to confront the far-right movements that were taking shape by that point in time.
In part out of necessity to fortify its own organizations and distinguish itself from the PT, the Brazilian far left lodged harsh critiques of Lula’s government and settled on a more or less systematic opposition to the governing party. At the same time, numerous left-wing organizations continued to follow an equally rigid plan of unquestioned obedience to the Lula administration.
Finally, after decades of conflict with the PT, the far left, still licking its wounds from the 2016 coup and Bolsonaro’s subsequent victory, is finding itself obliged to join forces with its one-time adversary? Boulos has been on hand as the figure capable of bringing unity across the Left. It is in that same sense that Boulos has become such a central figure in the current elections.
Every four years, the five-thousand-plus municipalities of Brazil vote for their mayors and city councilors — thousands of local elections taking place simultaneously, in municipalities as far-flung as the Amazon and as metropolitan as São Paulo.
In the midst of the ongoing crisis of the Bolsonaro administration plus the global pandemic, the outlook for Brazilian politics is uncertain. In São Paulo, where Bolsonaro swept the field in the 2018 presidential elections, a proud tradition of anti–left-wing sentiment — especially in well-to-do areas — is being eroded by an overwhelming sense of disenchantment with the president.
Indeed, though São Paulo has historically voted for right-wing candidates in national elections, it has always been divided in municipal elections, swinging between right-wing populists and the Left, generally under the tutelage of the PT.
Boulos won the PSOL primary race handily in a contest against federal deputy Sâmia Bomfim. From that moment on, the Boulos campaign has launched a successful communications strategy on social media, compensating for the little television airtime allotted by Brazilian legislation for smaller parties. Like Boulos himself, his campaign has stuck to firm talking points, delivered in an informal, accessible manner, which is a large part of his broad appeal and what has made him such a competitive candidate. This was especially evident when Boulos engaged in a war of words with the Bolsonaro-backed candidate Celso Russomanno, winning him even greater popularity.
In elections on Sunday, November 15, the PSOL doubled its votes in the city council, although it is still trailing the PT, which, though it saw a slump in votes, still maintains the majority of council members.
With the far right now out of the picture and the remarkable presence of Luiza Erundina as vice mayor (at eighty-five years old, she is still a powerful campaigner), not to mention the thousands of committed activists in toe, Boulos has set out to do more than fight for the mayorship of São Paulo. Boulos represents a vision in which it is not only possible to defeat Bolsonaro; it is also possible for the Brazilian left to do so without ceding ground to the neoliberal center. In that sense, even if Boulos does not manage a historic upset next week, he has delivered the decisive victory that the Brazilian left has badly needed. (IPA Service)
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