Voters set to punish mayor who 'made Rio de Janeiro miserable'

[Eugene]

Source: The Observer

Voters set to punish mayor who ‘made Rio de Janeiro miserable’

A landslide in Sunday’s election is predicted to sweep away the city’s ‘disastrous’ conservative leader

Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
Sat 28 Nov 2020 15.49 GMT

Tarcísio Motta is one of Rio’s best-known lefties – but when the city elects its new leader on Sunday, he’ll be voting for the right.

“We’ve got a mayor who’s an enemy of the city, and this can’t go on. It’s ludicrous,” complained the socialist councillor, one of millions of exasperated locals desperate to evict the neo-Pentecostal bishop Marcelo Crivella from city hall after what is widely regarded as a dismal four-year reign.

To deny Crivella a second term, leftwing critics such as Motta have one choice: holding their noses and backing his only challenger, the centre-right ex-mayor Eduardo Paes.

“I’ll vote for Eduardo Paes – and I’ll oppose him from day one,” Motta vowed, claiming Crivella’s “authoritarian, fundamentalist, anti-Rio project” had to be stopped. “The city doesn’t deserve this government,” he said. “Our vote is to veto Crivella.”

Crivella won power in 2016, one of the opening acts of a Bible-bashing conservative backlash against Brazil’s left that saw the far-right populist Jair Bolsonaro claim the presidency two years later.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/28/voters-punish-mayor-marcelo-crivella-rio-de-janeiro-miserable

[RussellCattle]

1. It's always nice to know that the politics of other countries is even more screwed up than our own.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Had to see his photo, and, on cue, a photo of an evangelistic-type sleazoid face appeared.

Would you buy a used car from this guy?