At 9.10am on a recent Saturday, the new mayor of São Paulo was already hard at work in overalls, goggles and a hard hat, methodically painting a rusty bus stop metallic grey as photographers swarmed around him.

Since assuming office on 1 January, João Doria – a multimillionaire businessman and TV presenter who once hosted Brazil’s version of The Apprentice – has also played the part of gardener and street cleaner to promote his headline-grabbing “Beautiful City” (Cidade Linda) campaign.

The idea is to turn this seething metropolis of 12 million people – often placed on global “ugliest city” lists – into a more pleasant place to live, visit and do business. And voters who gave him an unprecedented first-round victory in last October’s elections approve.

He is not the only unorthodox new mayor in Brazil. Marcelo Crivella – an evangelical bishop who has attacked Catholic doctrine as “demoniac” and gay people as “victims of a terrible evil” – won in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s carnival capital and second biggest city, which is still reeling from hosting last year’s Olympics.

Crivella and Doria beat leftist opponents and many saw their victories as a sign that Brazilians are rejecting traditional politicians. “Both are populists,” says Jairo Nicolau, a professor of political science at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. “They are outsiders.”

Rio de Janeiro’s new mayor, Marcelo Crivella, has called gay people ‘victims of a terrible evil’. Photograph: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty

Brazil’s debilitating recession – the worst on record – and widespread rejection of the Workers’ party, which ran Brazil for 13 years under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, factored into their victories. The party and its former allies are heavily embroiled in allegations of multibillion dollar graft. Anger over both scandal and recession fuelled Rousseff’s impeachment last August on charges of breaking budget laws. Under her successor, Michel Temer, unemployment has kept rising – to 12.3 million in the last quarter of 2016.

But after fighting campaigns powered by populist rhetoric, Doria and Crivella are now facing hard municipal reality.

Accelerating São Paulo?

Doria’s “Beautiful City” campaign has involved him in a “spray war” with the street artists for which São Paulo is world famous, after he ordered colourful graffiti to be covered with grey paint. “If he is going to paint over graffiti, he is not going to have a beautiful city,” said Mundano, a São Paulo activist and graffiti artist. “We already have a lot of grey.”

São Paulo’s incumbent mayor, Fernando Haddad – from the Workers’ party – had won plaudits for expanding cycle paths and reducing speed limits on two expressways.

Doria was mocked during campaigning for his preppy, patrician style – his cashmere sweaters, his mansion, the faces he pulled eating greasy street food – yet voters in low-income areas overwhelmingly voted for him over Haddad. “I went, I looked in the eyes of this population and talked directly to them,” he said in a recent interview with the Guardian, describing nearly 200 campaign visits to poor outlying neighbourhoods he had never been to before, despite growing up in the city.

His emphasis on hard work and good management played well in this thrusting, ambitious city, the motor of Brazil’s economy. And his #AcelereSP (Accelerate São Paulo) slogan is literal – he met a campaign promise to increase the speed limits Haddad had reduced, despite a significant fall in fatal accidents on both the city’s freeways during the lower limits.

Mayor Doria cleans the streets of São Paulo as part of the Cidade Linda (Beautiful City) project. Photograph: Brazil Photo Press/Levi Bianco/LatinContent/Getty

Doria was born into a upper-class family but is proud of saying he started work at 13. His father, a congressman, was exiled during the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964-1985. He made his fortune running a management and communications group, starring as a television interviewer and writing self-help books.

He rejects comparisons to Donald Trump, instead admiring Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire founder of the communications group that bears his name and former mayor of New York. Doria believes São Paulo should become a world centre for services and retail, capitalising on business conferences, events and the creative economy.

He has plans to revitalise the old city centre – where banks and bars are near areas where homeless people and drug users congregate – and relocate a huge wholesale produce market to make room for a technology park. Private investment, cost-cutting and combating fraud and tax dodging will help the city overcome its budget challenges, he said.

Doria has close relationships to business through Lide – a business organisation that is part of the group of companies he owns – and tapped companies to fund city projects, like estate agents Cyrela, a Lide member, who are renovating bathrooms in the Ibirapuera Park.

He promised not to increase bus fares, but then hiked the cost of various travel passes. A court eventually suspended the increase but protesters still took to the streets to demonstrate their opposition to the fare rises.

Protesters march through the streets of São Paulo last month in response to the raise in transport fares. Photograph: Cris Faga/CON/LatinContent/Getty Images

Preaching prosperity in Rio

Before winning the Rio election in a run-off vote, Marcelo Crivella, 59, was forced to apologise for his attacks on Catholic doctrine and homosexuality in a book he wrote in 1999 while working as a missionary in Africa.

Like Haddad in São Paulo, his opponent Marcelo Freixo only won middle-class areas – which in Rio are generally situated near its famous beaches.

Crivella’s campaign message was that his predecessor Eduardo Paes had concentrated too much on Olympic works, such as the new Bus Rapid Transit lines, and that it was now time to “take care of people”. This resonated across Rio’s chaotic urban sprawl, especially in its favelas – poor, improvised communities where a quarter of the city’s 6.5 million people live. Evangelical churches are often a more visible presence in these communities than the Brazilian state.

“His commitment is with the people,” says 56-year-old Claudia da Costa, leader of a residents’ association in a favela complex in Andaraí, north Rio, who said 90% of her community voted for Crivella. On a recent morning, children from a social project in Manguinhos – a favela where shootouts between police and drug gangs are common – hugged Crivella when he arrived to show them around the city’s new aquarium. “It was a dream,” said Luziana Pacheco, 52, the project coordinator.

Youths play by a polluted river in the Manguinhos slum complex in Rio de Janeiro. Photograph: Felipe Dana/AP

Crivella failed to show up for a number of TV and radio interviews during campaigning, and declined multiple interview requests from the Guardian. Instead, at the aquarium, he introduced his son, also called Marcelo. “This is the biggest challenge my father has had in his political career,” Marcelo Jr said. He has since been named as Crivella’s chief of staff. The mayor shrugged off criticism: “I’m the one who nominates,” he told reporters.

Evangelical Christians have grown to almost a quarter of Brazil’s population and are an increasing political force in the country. Crivella, who has released albums singing religious songs, is a bishop in the powerful Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and the nephew of its billionaire founder, Bishop Edir Macedo. The church owns one of Brazil’s biggest television networks, radio stations, and has an increasingly global presence. Its controversial “prosperity theology” connects financial success to faith.

Crivella said his city faced a similar crisis to Rio’s broke state government, which is paying salaries late and facing fierce opposition to austerity measures. He predicted an £820m deficit for 2017 and said hundreds of thousands dodging property taxes needed to pay up. Then it emerged that his own vice-mayor was one of them – and owed tens of thousands of pounds.

Crivella trained as a civil engineer and served as a senator and minister of fishing under Rousseff for the Brazilian Republican party – linked to the Universal Church. A small party like his would not be compromised by close relationships to big companies, as is the case with traditional politicians, his son said.

In his inaugural address, Crivella quoted Bishop Macedo on the importance of family, promised less spending and more public-private partnerships, and said he wanted to reduce inequality, fix failing health services and cut waiting lists. His education, sport and leisure secretary, César Benjamin, said he has already contracted 825 new teachers.

Benjamin said Crivella has “clear religious principles” but argued they won’t directly influence his policy. “The biggest proof of this is that he put me in the education secretariat,” Benjamin said. As a member of the armed leftist resistance to Brazil’s dictatorship, Benjamin was imprisoned and tortured. He later helped found the Workers’ party.

Benjamin plans to make Rio’s Olympic facilities available for schoolchildren. “We received these installations in a precarious condition, we are repairing them and we are going to use them for our 650,000 students,” he said.

Crivella’s vice-mayor and transport secretary, Fernando Mac Dowell, is a respected transport specialist who helped built the city’s metro system and now wants to take over its running from the state government. He also has ambitious plans to build a new container port near Rio’s existing terminal, which he said would create jobs and income. “This changes the economy of Rio,” he announced.

But he is fighting the political fallout caused by reports in Rio’s O Globo newspaper that he owes £55,000 in unpaid city taxes. Mac Dowell said the sum is £36,000 and promised to pay.

“I can’t manufacture money,” he said. A comment both mayors may want to repeat before their mandates are over.

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