By Anthony Boadle
BRASILIA (Reuters) - Conservative and center-right parties were the big winners in Brazil's city elections on Sunday, but right-leaning voters preferred moderates to candidates endorsed by harder line former President Jair Bolsonaro.
The left won only two races in the 26 state capital cities electing new mayors in two rounds of voting that ended in Sunday's runoffs.
Four center-right parties, led by the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the traditional Democratic Movement Party (MDB) won the most mayoral races, while Bolsonaro's Liberal Party (PL) fared worse than expected.
The results underscore the complex legacy of Bolsonaro's divisive presidency, marked by evangelical and gun rights fervor, vaccine skepticism, disregard for indigenous rights and active encouragement of illegal mining and logging.
Candidates backed by the populist firebrand lost in large cities like Belo Horizonte and Fortaleza, and even in Goiania, the capital of farm state Goias, where Bolsonaro campaigned.
In Sao Paulo, Latin America's largest city, Mayor Ricardo Nunes won handily against Guilherme Boulos, the leftist candidate endorsed by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Nunes was backed by Sao Paulo Governor Tarcisio de Freitas, who emerges as a likely successor to Bolsonaro as standard-bearer of the right.
Bolsonaro's support for Nunes of the MDB party was tepid and he hardly campaigned for him, because his strongest supporters backed far-right influencer Pablo Marcal. Marcal has sought to position himself as Bolsonaro's political heir, but he did not make it to the run-off between Nunes and Boulos.
"The conservative movement that Bolsonaro started in Brazil has outgrown him," said Leonardo Barreto, a political scientist at Think Policy consultancy.
Center-right parties want to have Bolsonaro as their ally because he draws crowds of right-wing voters, but they do not want his leadership, Barreto said.
Bolsonaro, whose own political future is unclear, lost political capital in several city races where his candidates failed to get elected, such as Belo Horizonte, Fortaleza, Belem and Curitiba, according to Andre Cesar at Hold Assessoria Legislativa consultancy.
"Bolsonaro's leadership is being questioned today and other names are emerging on the far-right," Cesar said. "But it was the center and center-right that won these local elections."
The big winner was the PSD led by Gilberto Kassab, who backed Nunes in Sao Paulo and whose party won more city halls than any other, making him a major player in Brazilian politics, Cesar said.
The municipal elections showed that Bolsonaro is still a fixture on the political stage, even though he was banned by Brazil's electoral authority from seeking elected office until 2030 for baseless attacks on the integrity of the country's electronic voting system.
His PL party is banking on Congress passing an amendment that would overturn the court order banning Bolsonaro for eight years, but the chances of lawmakers approving that legislation appear more remote after the local elections, analysts said.