São Paulo Gov. Tarcísio de Freitas won a second term on Sunday without a runoff, finishing far ahead of Fernando Haddad, the former finance minister whom President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had persuaded to enter the race. The electoral court declared him elected after a final count that gave him 62.65 percent of valid votes to Haddad's 36.42 percent.
His roughly 14.5 million votes were the most any candidate for governor of São Paulo has drawn since Brazil's return to democracy, by the count of the news site G1, eclipsing the 13.48 million he won in the 2022 runoff. He carried 639 of the state's 645 municipalities, including the city of São Paulo, which had gone to Haddad four years ago; Haddad won six, among them Diadema and Francisco Morato in greater São Paulo. No race for the governorship had been settled in the first round since 2014, when Geraldo Alckmin, now Lula's vice president and then a member of the PSDB, won re-election. That was also the last time the state kept a sitting governor in office.
Tarcísio, 51, was infrastructure minister under former President Jair Bolsonaro and beat Haddad in that 2022 runoff, 55.27 percent to 44.73 percent. He was talked about as Bolsonaro's successor on this year's presidential ballot but was passed over for the former president's son, Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, and from late last year he concentrated solely on his own re-election. The newspaper Estadão wrote that Sunday's result makes him a potential presidential candidate in 2030, and Folha de S.Paulo said the 10-party coalition behind him is expected to serve as the base for such a run.
In his victory speech, Tarcísio turned at once to the Oct. 25 presidential runoff, in which Flávio Bolsonaro faces Lula. "We elected the governor, we elected two senators, and now São Paulo is going to be decisive, you can be sure, in electing Flávio Bolsonaro president of the Republic," he said, urging supporters to stay mobilized. He also congratulated the state's two senators-elect, Guilherme Derrite and André do Prado. With every polling station counted, Flávio carried São Paulo in Sunday's first round with 51.93 percent of valid votes to Lula's 38.2 percent, and his campaign expects the governor to throw himself into the national race. Tarcísio's allies say he will, Estadão reported, on the argument that Lula's Workers' Party has to be beaten.
Through most of the campaign, though, the governor kept the senator at arm's length. According to Folha, Tarcísio held his ties to Flávio to the minimum needed to keep his alliance with the Bolsonaro movement intact. As controversies built up around the senator, the governor avoided mentioning him in the two debates he attended and kept him off his social media feeds. Marco Antonio Carvalho Teixeira, a political scientist at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, told G1 that Tarcísio kept his distance so Flávio would not drag him down, offering emphatic support only in the closing stretch. Estadão noted a longer-term complication: a Flávio victory could stand in the way of a Tarcísio candidacy in 2030, because the senator would be eligible for re-election, though Flávio has signaled that he would propose ending re-election.
Haddad conceded on Sunday evening, saying he had called Tarcísio to congratulate him and wish him luck. He said a race with only two competitive candidates had narrowed his chances and promised that his side would act as an opposition working "in the most constructive way possible" to improve people's lives. He had resisted running for governor a second time and gave in to Lula's wishes, giving up his government post to do so. It was the fourth straight election Haddad has failed to win; his last victory came in the 2012 race for mayor of São Paulo.
Tarcísio ran on continuity. His campaign highlighted the restart of stalled projects such as the northern stretch of the Rodoanel beltway and two subway lines, and he had the support of more than 600 mayors, most prominently São Paulo's Ricardo Nunes. His first term had its troubles. In May, an accident at a construction site of the water utility Sabesp killed four people in São Paulo's West Zone. In late June, a train run by the private operator Trívia Trens caught fire, and with its lines in crisis, the concession was temporarily handed back to the state rail company. For a second term he has promised universal sanitation by 2029 through the privatized Sabesp and the completion of an intercity train between São Paulo and Campinas.
Across the country, Estadão described the night as an expansion of the right's strength in the states, noting that it took São Paulo and Minas Gerais, the two largest electorates, and added Paraná to its first-round wins. Tarcísio's Republicanos party will govern both of the largest states after Sen. Cleitinho won in Minas Gerais, and Bolsonaro's Liberal Party elected five governors in the first round, among them Sen. Sergio Moro in Paraná. Lula's Workers' Party kept its base in the Northeast, re-electing governors in Bahia, Ceará and Piauí. Over the next three weeks, the paper wrote, Tarcísio and the other winners will have to show how much of that state-level strength they can carry into the race for the presidency.