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| - Brazil's biggest cities, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, voted for their next mayors Sunday as the country held municipal runoffs, the last polls before far-right President Jair Bolsonaro is up for reelection in 2022. In Sao Paulo, Brazil's economic and cultural capital and the largest city in Latin America, centrist incumbent Bruno Covas faced leftist challenger Guilherme Boulos, a leader of the Homeless Workers' Movement (MTST). Young and charismatic, Boulos, 38, was hailed as the new face of Brazil's battered left, but appeared to face an uphill battle to beat Covas as counting got under way. Covas led with 60 percent of the vote with half the ballots counted, according to early official results. Polling firm Datafolha called the race for the incumbent, in a disappointment for Boulos's upstart Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL). Boulos, who came from behind in the polls to reach the second round -- beating both Bolsonaro's candidate and a leftist rival from the more-established Workers' Party (PT) -- hoped to pull off a similar turnaround in the runoff. But Covas, 40, is also a fighter. Even though he is currently battling multiple cancers, he famously installed a bed in his office and moved into city hall so he could continue working when he had to put the city on partial lockdown because of the pandemic. Covas has a powerful backer in Sao Paulo state Governor Joao Doria, his predecessor and mentor, a top contender to challenge Bolsonaro for the presidency. The pandemic has indelibly marked the municipal elections in the giant country of 212 million people. Bolsonaro, who has downplayed the virus as a "little flu," faces criticism for his handling of Covid-19, which has killed more than 172,000 people in Brazil -- the second-highest death toll worldwide, after the United States. The municipal polls -- which are essentially Brazil's midterm elections -- were postponed by six weeks because of the pandemic, with the period between the first and second rounds reduced from four weeks to two. "We need another kind of government, a government that is more concerned with the people, and does its job," said Sao Paulo voter Vanise Santos, 49, a psychologist. "The federal government is a real disaster," she told AFP. In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil's second city, Datafolha projected the race for ex-mayor Eduardo Paes of the traditional right-wing Democrats party (DEM) over incumbent Mayor Marcelo Crivella, a Bolsonaro ally. Official results gave Paes 65 percent of the vote with three-quarters of ballots counted. Paes, who presided over Rio when it hosted the 2014 World Cup final and 2016 Olympics, vowed to safeguard the iconic seaside city's traditions of diversity and acceptance, which critics accused Crivella, an Evangelical pastor, of threatening. Other results to watch include the northeastern city of Recife -- scene of a family feud on the left between cousins Joao Campos of the center-left Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB) and Marilia Arraes of the PT -- and the southern city of Porto Alegre. There, another rising left-wing star, Manuela D'Avila of the Communist Party of Brazil, faced centrist candidate Sebastiao Melo, in a city rocked by violent protests following the first-round vote after two white security guards killed a black customer at a supermarket. The first-round vote went badly for Bolsonaro, who currently has no political party. The so-called "Tropical Trump" upended Brazilian politics when he stormed to victory in the 2018 presidential race, but looks more vulnerable after helping elect just two of the 13 mayoral candidates he endorsed, and just nine of 45 city council candidates. "As Trump would say, 'He supported a bunch of losers,'" said political scientist David Fleischer of the University of Brasilia. Traditional center-right and right-wing parties meanwhile emerged strengthened from the first round. As polls closed and results began coming in, all eyes were on how the runoffs would shape the political state of play ahead of 2022, when Bolsonaro is expected to seek reelection. In all, 57 cities across Brazil were holding mayoral runoffs. bur-jhb/mdl
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