Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro attends the flag-raising ceremony at his official residence in Brasilia, Brazil, July 22, 2020. (Photo by Lucio Tavora/Xinhua)

Brazil's Congress on Monday elected two allies of President Jair Bolsonaro to head the Senate and lower house, an important victory for the far-right leader as he seeks to regalvanize his reelection efforts for 2022.

Arthur Lira of the Progressives (PP) won in the first round of votes for speaker of the Chamber of Deputies by 302 votes out of 513. Earlier, the Democrats' (DEM) Rodrigo Pacheco was elected Senate speaker with 57 out of 81 votes.

Bolsonaro hailed the results on Twitter, posting photos of himself with the new congressional leaders.

He had gotten personally involved in the leadership battles in both houses of the legislature, looking to improve his troubled relations with Congress and stave off the 61 impeachment requests he is facing.

The speakers of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, who are elected for two-year terms by their colleagues, are key gate-keepers in Brazilian politics, with the power to decide which legislation comes up for a vote.

The lower-house speaker also has the power to accept or shelve motions to impeach the president - no small matter for the leader dubbed the "Tropical Trump," who has racked up dozens of such requests halfway into his four-year term.

Lira promised "neutrality" in leading the House and asked for a minute of silence to honor the victims of COVID-19.

Bolsonaro, who currently has no political party, has struggled to get legislation passed in Congress, and is increasingly unpopular amid a raging second wave of COVID-19 in Brazil.

He won the election in 2018 with support from the business sector, vowing to push through a long-delayed program of privatizations and austerity reforms.

But he has made virtually no progress on that agenda. Instead, the economy has taken a beating from the pandemic, which Bolsonaro has insistently downplayed.

Seeking to use the leadership votes to bolster his clout with Congress, Bolsonaro struck an alliance with a coalition known as the "Centrao," or "big center," a loose group of parties whose priority has traditionally been gaining access to pork and government posts.

AFP