In the municipal elections of 2016, the Brazilian left suffered its most significant defeat since the turn of the century. The Workers’ Party — Brazil’s best-structured political group — was inevitably the face of the debacle, losing 60 percent of its mayoral offices, shrinking from being the country’s third-largest party in municipal terms to being the tenth, reverting to where it was before former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva initiated the party’s four-election winning streak, between 2002 and 2014.
This poor run of form continued in 2018. Besides losing the presidential election to Jair Bolsonaro — who...
