Brazil's Workers' Party lost control of Sao Paulo city hall in a nationwide municipal polls rout that saw the long dominant leftist force punished by voters angry at recession and corruption.
In a shock result, the Workers' Party mayor of Brazil's biggest city, Fernando Haddad, was trounced by Joao Doria from the centrist PSDB yesterday. A second round runoff had been widely predicted but Doria cleared the required 50 percent barrier with 53 percent of the vote, meaning he won outright.
The loss of Sao Paulo headlined a dark day for the Workers' Party, which shaped Brazil for the last 13 years but risks freefall as Brazilians shift to the right ahead of 2018 presidential elections.
"It's a very hard defeat for the Workers' Party," said Michael Mohallem, a politics expert at the Getulia Vargas Foundation. "The question is how hard it would be -- and it was very hard."
The elections for mayors and city governments across 5,568 municipalities in Latin America's biggest country were the first since Dilma Rousseff of the Workers' Party lost the presidency in a bruising impeachment battle in August.
They also come as Workers' Party founder and former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva faces corruption charges that could sink his already flagging political career.
In Rio de Janeiro, the result was more mixed.
The first round was won by Marcelo Crivella from the socially conservative Brazilian Republican Party (PRB), considered the political wing of the wealthy evangelical Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.
But Crivella, whose billionaire uncle founded the Universal Church, got only 28 percent of the vote and will face off on October 30 against leftist Marcelo Freixo from the PSOL, who got 18 percent.
Among the earliest to cast a ballot in Sao Paulo, which is also Brazil's financial powerhouse, was Rousseff's post-impeachment replacement, President Michel Temer from the center-right PMDB party.
Temer, who is deeply unpopular and was booed at the opening ceremony of the Rio Olympics in August, abruptly changed his schedule to vote two hours earlier than previously announced, getting into the polling station before doors even opened to the public, an AFP reporter observed. According to Folha newspaper, the change was to avoid protesters.
But despite widespread public mistrust of Temer, the PSDB and other parties friendly to the new president won sweeping victories against the Workers' Party.
Symbolising how much influence the Workers' Party has lost, the communist mayoral candidate in Rio de Janeiro, who had been personally supported by Rousseff and Lula, got only three percent.
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