In a little under 12 months, Brazil’s voters will go to the polls once again to elect mayors and local councilors of the country’s 5,570 municipalities. Coming at the halfway point of Jair Bolsonaro’s presidential term, next year’s elections will serve as an important yardstick for the current administration and could indicate some upcoming trends for the next national vote in 2022.
If the race for the presidential palace in 2022 is already being talked about three years before the fact, one can be under no illusion that the 2020 municipal election campaign is well underway, with key battlegrounds being set up in the country’s biggest cities.
We don’t need no television
Last year’s presidential vote turned out to be Brazil’s very first social media election, with campaigning on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp Messenger turning out to be much more effective than traditional vote-whipping on television and radio.
The ultimate example of this shift in political advertising came in the shape of President Jair Bolsonaro. As a member of the Social Liberal Party (PSL)—at the time a dwarfish figure in Brazilian politics—he received only eight seconds of TV advertising space in each hour of political broadcasts last year.
Television time in Brazil is divvied up in accordance with the amount of representatives each party has in Congress, with the total able to be increased by making alliances between parties. Geraldo Alckmin, the candidate for the moderate right-wing Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), ended up with nine of the country’s 35 parties in his corner and had a full five minutes and 32 seconds of advertising time to himself.
However, when the ballots were counted up, Jair...
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