BRASILIA (Reuters) – Brazil’s municipal elections showed that new parties have failed to capitalize on voters’ disenchantment with a corruption-tainted political establishment, making it unlikely an outsider will win the 2018 presidential poll.
The political movements nurtured by the anti-corruption street protests of 2013 and 2015, despite a massive presence on social media, won just a handful of mayoral posts and local council seats in Sunday’s nationwide polls.
In the first elections since President Dilma Rousseff was dismissed in August for breaking budget rules, her leftist Workers Party lost nearly two-thirds of the cities it controlled, amid a backlash at a massive graft scandal at state oil company Petrobras.
Yet more than 4,000 of Brazil’s 5,568 municipalities will remain in the hands of traditional parties aligned with new centre-right President Michel Temer, whose Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) has also been embroiled in the Petrobras investigation.
“We felt like the 300 of Sparta, fighting against the system,” said Felipe Camozza-to, one of four winning candidates of the New Party, referring to the ancient Greeks’ heroic defeat by a far larger Persian force at the battle of Thermopylae.
