The first round of municipal elections in Brazil, which took place on October 6 in all 5,500 cities save for the capital Brasília, had several winners. But one man, Gilberto Kassab, emerged as the biggest winner of them all.
He has not run for an election since 2008. Still, he holds the purse strings of the Social Democratic Party (PSD), which, for the first time, elected the most mayors in the country: 888, or about 15 percent of the total, not to mention its candidates who qualified for a runoff to take place on October 27 in many of the country’s biggest cities.
Despite his immense political clout, Mr. Kassab remains unknown to most Brazilians.
Mr. Kassab, age 64, is the fifth of seven children of a physician and a teacher. After graduating in both economics and civil engineering, he worked as a real estate agent before starting his political career as a councilman in São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city, in 1993. It took off very fast.
He was elected to the state assembly in 1994 and resigned from that post as well to serve as the planning secretary for City Hall under Mayor Celso Pitta. He was later elected for two terms as congressman (in 1998 and 2002) and once again resigned — this time to serve as deputy mayor on José Serra's ticket.
When Mr. Serra resigned in early 2006 to run for governor, Mr. Kassab inherited the keys to Brazil’s biggest city. As mayor, he implemented the Clean City Act, successfully banning thousands of billboards that visually polluted São Paulo. The move was popular enough to make Mr. Kassab, in 2008, the first-ever mayor to win re-election in the city, beating former left-wing mayor Marta Suplicy in a runoff.
This was also the last election Mr. Kassab ever ran in. From that moment on, he became a master politician behind the scenes, serving in several positions under different leaders from both the left and right and creating his own political party without placing his name on a ticket.
Mr. Kassab declined several interview requests for this story.
A big fish in a big pond
Leonardo Barreto, a political consultant with a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Brasília, told The Brazilian Report that creating the PSD was Mr. Kassab’s biggest step in accumulating his power today.
He launched the party in 2011 while he was still mayor of São Paulo. Self-described as a party that is “neither to the right, nor to the left, nor in the center,” the PSD became a sort of Noah’s Ark, with room for anybody who wants to join.
For Mr. Barreto, Mr. Kassab had a tremendous “sense of opportunity.”
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had served as president for two terms (2003-2010), creating an expectation within many political elites of a shift in power to the right. That expectation was frustrated with the victory of Lula’s anointed successor, Dilma Rousseff, in the 2010 election.
Moreover, many politicians from major right-of-center parties at the time — such as Democratas, the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), and the Brazilian Democratic Movement party (MDB) — were frustrated with being small fish in a big pond, alienated by the prominent national leaders.
In fact, Mr. Kassab would go on to serve from 2015 to 2016 as cities minister under Dilma Rousseff. Members of his PSD party later voted to impeach her, and Mr. Kassab, fittingly, served as science and technology minister under her successor and former vice president, Michel Temer — hence staying in power despite the country's political U-turn.
“There were people within those parties [Democratas and PSDB] who were tired of being in the opposition [around 2010] and wanted to be in the government,” Mr. Barreto said. Mr. Kassab picked local leaders in several states and gave them autonomy to set up their local PSD chapters. “Overnight, leaders got funds and the power to design the party in their entire state,” he said.
This autonomy was not entirely free. Mr. Barreto, who attended several meetings with both Mr. Kassab and the late president of the PSD in Minas Gerais, Paulo Simão, said that Mr. Kassab would often give instructions in the guise of advice. “He would say, ‘talk to this guy, it will give you political strength,’ as if helping the other person for their own interest, but in reality, he was helping himself.”
Mr. Kassab, he added, would also participate in meetings and listen a lot, giving the impression that he was being informed when in fact he already knew what he needed and had already made his decisions. “He was a manipulator in that sense.”
This behavior extends to interviews. Mr. Kassab tries to project power that he does not actually have. For instance, earlier this month, he said that right-wing São Paulo Governor Tarcísio de Freitas should not run for president in 2026 but instead wait until 2030 so as not to challenge Lula.
Although Mr. Kassab does have a role in Mr. Freitas’s cabinet as his government secretary, he does not have that kind of sway over him, Mr. Barreto said. “The governor’s propelling rocket is Jair Bolsonaro — Mr. Kassab will never decide Mr. Freitas’s future.” Moreover, Mr. Freitas is a member of the Republicans party, dominated by Evangelical preachers — although his lieutenant governor, Felicio Ramuth, is a member of the PSD.
Despite publicly exaggerating his influence, Mr. Barreto said that Mr. Kassab is currently the most capable politician in Brazil. “He plays 27 chess games simultaneously, one in each state,” and is aware of the forces at play in each one.
A second significant event that led to Mr. Kassab’s tremendous power was the creation of the electoral fund in 2017, a reaction by Congress to the 2015 Supreme Court ban on private companies sponsoring electoral campaigns.
In 2024, the electoral fund amounted to a total of BRL 4.9 billion (USD 870 million), of which the PSD received BRL 420 million (USD 74 million) to spend nationwide on campaigns for mayors and councilors.
“The electoral fund led to a profound verticalization of parties,” Mr. Barreto said, turning party presidents into “big barons of the political process.” Previously, politicians would get funds from their own relationships with lobbies and sponsors, but the business model has changed. Those who do not work closely with the president will not get funds for the next election, according to the ‘golden rule’: “He who has the gold makes the rules,” Mr. Barreto quipped.
This power tends to increase as the number of political parties dwindles due to a series of minor political reforms passed by Congress in 2015 and 2017, introducing higher thresholds for party representation and banning the smaller ones from accessing public funds. “Mr. Kassab has a horizon of power until the day he dies,” Mr. Barreto said.
