Municipal elections highlight challenges facing Brazil’s left-wing

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 won in all regions bar the poor Northeast — the Workers’ Party managed to elect only three state governors and four senators.

Within the left, an improved performance in 2020 is seen as mandatory to put the Workers’ Party in a position to beat Jair Bolsonaro at the ballot boxes come the next presidential election in 2022, but the party remains riddled by myriad challenges.

The biggest of these is the fact that the Workers’ Party continues to...