Brazilians call overcast São Paulo their country’s “land of drizzle”.
But in recent months it has been raining punches not precipitation as Latin America’s largest city endures what observers call the most violent and unruly election in its history.
Physical violence has meant two recent debates ahead of the 6 October mayoral election ended with participants being treated in hospital and questioned by police.
In the first case, José Luiz Datena, the celebrity host of a sensationalist crime TV show, lost his cool and walloped a rival for the mayoralty called Pablo Marçal with a carbon steel stool.
During a second debate, an aide to Marçal – a far-right self-help guru and convicted fraudster – thumped an adversary’s spin doctor, landing him in hospital where he required a Cat scan and six stitches to a face wound.
Those attacks led the campaign’s leading female candidate, Tabata Amaral, to deplore what she called “a horror show of out of control and violent men”.
“It’s a real shame for the city,” complained Amaral, 30, a centrist congresswoman who said she had hoped for a campaign focused on education, healthcare and public safety, not bloodshed and brawls.
The president of Brazil’s top electoral court, Cármen Lúcia Antunes Rocha, echoed those comments, urging police and prosecutors to investigate and punish violence which she called an insult to voters and democracy. The 2024 election, Rocha complained on Tuesday, had witnessed “the most contemptible and criminal scenes, which had reduced politics to episodes of pugilism, irrationality and police reports”.
The fisticuffs have caused anger and bemusement, but also a hint of titillation among São Paulo’s 11 million-plus citizens – and made global headlines. “Brazilian Politician Upends Debate by Hitting Opponent With Chair,” the New York Times declared in its report about Datena’s “stunning” on-air assault on Marçal which came after the latter called the former a coward. The British tabloid the Sun invited readers to watch footage of “the WWE-style brawl”.
One political journalist, José Roberto de Toledo, said that in nearly 40 years covering São Paulo elections he had never witnessed such ignominious scenes as the weaponisation of furniture. But Toledo, whose podcast, A Hora, is chronicling the slugfest’s political implications, challenged the generalization that São Paulo’s election was in itself violent.
Rather, Toledo believed the turmoil was the handiwork of one man – Marçal – a controversial social media whiz and populist provocateur who many accuse of deliberately stirring up trouble in order to attract attention and win votes.
“This phenomenon has a name [and] a surname … It’s called Pablo Marçal,” said Toledo, describing how the multimillionaire rightwing influencer goaded rivals into verbal or physical confrontations he hoped would go viral.
“He’s the violent element in this election,” Toledo added. “If you take him out of the picture, everything’s normal.”
The attention-grabbing tactics employed by Marçal, a 37-year-old often portrayed as a more provocative version of Brazil’s far-right ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, have been shocking, even for a nation accustomed to Bolsonaro’s brash behaviour.
In recent weeks Marçal has relentlessly harassed and smeared opponents and journalists during media appearances, calling them pussies, wimps, lame arses, crypto-communists, scumbags, mental retards and orangutans.
He has also made a series of baseless insinuations about his rivals, suggesting, without evidence, that one was a cocaine user and another a rapist. In July, Marçal went so far as to suggest that Amaral was responsible for her father’s suicide – a slur she called a “dirty, filthy lie” and for which he later apologized.
Toledo said Marçal’s aggressive rhetoric and mastery of the dark arts of social media had helped him commandeer a significant chunk of Bolsonaro’s electorate. Bolsonaro has endorsed São Paulo’s incumbent rightwing mayor, Ricardo Nunes, but polls suggest many Bolsonaristas will vote Marçal. “Pablo Marçal has broken Bolsonaro’s hegemony over the radical right,” Toledo said.
Marçal looks unlikely to win the election, despite dominating headlines and boasting about 20% of intended votes. Polls indicate that about half of voters oppose a politician whose past run-ins with the police have been widely documented in the media. In 2010, Marçal received a four-year prison sentence for allegedly being part of a cyber gang that used malware to steal money from banks. (Marçal, who denied knowledge of the criminal racket, reportedly avoided jail thanks to the statute of limitations). A run-off between Nunes and Guilherme Boulos, a leftist congressman supported by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, looks likely.
But Marçal’s incendiary style of politics looks set to linger, with the influencer tipped to run for Brazil’s 81-seat senate in 2026.
Amaral, who is polling in fourth place, behind Nunes, Boulos and Marçal, decried how such a “despicable character” was hogging the election limelight. “I find it utterly absurd that such a person is being considered [for mayor],” she said, pointing to Marçal’s criminal past and reports – which he denies – linking close allies to organized crime.
One of the culprits for his success, Amaral thought, was social media, whose algorithms allowed such rabble-rousers to thrive. “We need to regulate the social networks in Brazil,” she said.
