Carnival of Brazil's local elections sets the scene for presidential race

LETTER FROM BRAZIL: WHEN IT comes to democracy, few places in the world can match Brazil for exotic weirdness. Among the more than 350,000 candidates for yesterday's local elections were such familiar names as Barak Obama, Bin Laden, DJ Saddam, Bill Clinton and Jorge Bushi, writes Tom Hennigan

One candidate goes by the name King of the Cuckolds while a stripper turned politician ran as Deborah Soft, recommending that electors "vote with pleasure". In Rio de Janeiro Santa Claus was battling it out for a seat on the city council with Tarzan and US 1960s radical Jerry Rubin.

Two brothers running for mayor and councilman for the ruling Workers Party registered as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, allowing them to plaster their home town with red posters asking voters to elect Marx and Engels. More than 200 candidates renamed themselves after the country's wildly popular president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

In local elections the trick is to stand out in what is a very crowded field. Brazil allows candidates to register under any name and many pick the most bizarre in order to grab attention.

Free campaign airtime, the lure of lavish salaries and a voting system that the Monster Raving Loony Party would die for have fostered a have-a-go DIY political culture that would boggle the mind of the US's founding fathers, who brought democracy to the Americas.

But behind the wacky monikers and improbable election pledges, the vote and a run-off round in three weeks are of huge importance in preparing the ground for the presidential elections in 2010.

President Lula's popularity on the back of a booming economy and his successful social programmes means candidates he is backing look set to do well, which will strengthen his hand in his bid to control who succeeds him in two years. The local elections are crucial for several of the political heavyweights who are already jockeying for position in that race, nowhere more so than in the city of São Paulo.

The frontrunner to become mayor of South America's biggest city is Marta Suplicy, a former sex therapist and candidate for Lula's Workers Party. The woman known to everyone simply as Marta is eager to use São Paulo's mayor's office as the launch pad for her bid to replace Lula in 2010.

One of her main rivals in the mayoral race is Geraldo Alckmin, whom Lula defeated in the 2006 presidential race. He also sees the city's mayoral office as a stepping stone to another assault on the biggest political prize but his campaign has been undermined from within his own party, the Social Democrats, which is Brazil's main opposition force.

José Serra, the state's governor, comes from the same party as Alckmin but is another politician with ambitions of running for the presidency in 2010, in his case to wipe away the memory of his own loss to Lula in 2002.

Serra has clearly decided that his path to the Social Democrat nomination in two years' time will be smoother should Alckmin fail in his mayoral bid and so has been backing the city's incumbent mayor, Gilberto Kassab of the Democrats.

The other mayoral contest with implications for the presidential succession is taking place in Brazil's third city, Belo Horizonte. The city is capital of Minas Gerais, Brazil's second most populous state and one that has vied with São Paulo to supply Brazil with its presidents.

The current governor of Minas is Aécio Neves, a young moderniser from an illustrious political dynasty who talks like he is already a candidate for the country's top job.

Neves is also from the opposition Social Democrats but has far better relations with President Lula and the Minas branch of the Workers Party than exists between the two parties in São Paulo. This has allowed him to forge a local coalition between the two in support of the Socialist candidate for the mayor's job in Belo Horizonte.

Neves openly touts this as the possible model for a national coalition between the Workers Party and Social Democrats in 2010, presumably in support of his own presidential bid.

It is a tantalizing prospect for many Brazilians who lament the fact that the two main progressive parties in the country have spent the years since the return of democracy as arch rivals for the presidency, willing to forge alliances with some of Brazil's most corrupt and reactionary political forces in their battle to defeat each other.

Once the dust settles on the latest carnival of Brazilian democracy it might just be a little clearer as to whether such a historic reconciliation could in fact be possible.

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times