The electoral results of October 7 have shown a true conservative tsunami. Right-wing and far-right candidates have enjoyed hugely positive results – and Jair Bolsonaro is set to win the presidency by a landslide on October 28. The former Army captain has turned his attention to the Northeast of Brazil, where he fared much worse than his competitor, Workers’ Party Fernando Haddad, in the first round of voting. It was Brazil’s poorest region that forced the presidential race into a runoff.
For the past decade and a half, the Northeast has been the Workers’ Party stronghold, thanks to the social policies it put forward during the presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Of the nine states in...