Shots fired amid jostling for São Paulo governor running-mate spot

Tarcísio de Freitas was supposed to be the right wing’s great Brazilian hope — the man who would eventually succeed Jair Bolsonaro as the face of Brazilian conservatism and march triumphantly to the presidency. Instead, he will be running for re-election as governor of São Paulo later this year, a consolation prize dressed up as a strategic choice. And now, the coalition keeping him politically comfortable is showing its first real cracks.

The source of that friction is Gilberto Kassab, the boss of the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and Freitas’s secretary of government and institutional relations. Late in January, Kassab said Freitas’s deference to former President Jair Bolsonaro (the governor’s political godfather) is increasingly looking like submission. He added that a politician of Freitas’s stature — in charge of Brazil’s wealthiest and most populous state — “needs to show that he has his own identity.”

It took some time, but Freitas finally fired back this Thursday, without mentioning Kassab by name. “I find it interesting how people confuse loyalty with submission,” he said during an event in Itapecerica da Serra, in Greater São Paulo. “Friendship and loyalty have become rare attributes in politics. People act out of self-interest.”