Its official name is farinata, but critics had another name for it: human pet food.

Made from expired staple foods such as pasta and flour, the dish prompted an immediate backlash when the mayor of São Paulo, João Doria, suggested it as a way to feed the poor people and schoolchildren of South America’s largest city.

The idea was savaged by nutritionists, who demanded more information about farinata’s nutritional content and safety. There was an immediate public outcry, and prosecutors opened an inquiry. Then, two weeks ago, Doria made an abrupt about-turn.

“We completely gave up,” he told the Guardian this week. But he insisted that “farinata is not a bad product” and blamed leftist parties for spreading “untruths” about it.

Now he is pushing a new plan that couldn’t be more different: an increase in fresh and organic produce in school meals, and developing an app with Unesco for parents to monitor their children’s lunches.

Such contradictions, however, are nothing new for Doria.

Farinata de Doria já tem lobby no Congresso e pode se espalhar pelo Paíshttps://t.co/iO45X36JtM pic.twitter.com/IQPnKimgyQ — Luis Nassif (@luisnassif) October 25, 2017

For most of his life, this multimillionaire from a wealthy family was a businessman, then became the host of Brazil’s version of The Apprentice. In the autumn of 2016, he rode a conservative surge to an unprecedented landslide victory over the leftist Workers’ party which had run the city for four years.

Since then, he has been a bullish presence on social media, aggressively challenging anyone who criticises him, and cosied up to hard-right other politicians have avoided.

If that reminds you of another prominent populist, it likely wouldn’t bother Doria. Like Donald Trump, this is a politician who only seems to grow stronger the more his opponents grow infuriated – and who has built a career on polarising opinion.

Like Trump, he is a politician who delights in not being a politician, makes adept use of social media and divides even his own party – in Doria’s case the centre-right Brazilian Social Democratic party, the PSDB. He himself says he would prefer to be compared to Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York.



“São Paulo is a polarised city: rich and poor, right and left,” said Joyce Pascowitch, a magazine publisher. “He has the way of the rich and the right.”



Doria’s supporters hail him as a new breed of politician; at the inauguration of São Paulo’s Christmas tree on Saturday, people mobbed him for selfies after the lights were switched on by a man dressed as Santa Claus who had arrived in a convoy of Coca Cola-branded trucks decorated with fake snow. One truck bore an igloo with a sign praising Doria’s campaign to clean up the city.

João Dória sweeps the streets to promote his city clean-up campaign. Photograph: Brazil Photo Press/LatinContent/Getty

Marketing executive Thiago Junqueira, 32, shepherded his wife, Julia, and baby son, Theo, for a beaming family photo with the mayor.

“He represents a new way to do politics,” Junqueira said later. “And he is very good at marketing.”

In his interview, Doria said health was his administration’s “standard bearer”, and repeated a claim to have “zeroed” a hospital waiting list of nearly half a million people in need of exams such as radiography.

He has not changed; he has just got richer. I knew he would do well, but not so well Joyce Pascowitch, fellow pupil

In May, the Brazilian fact-checking agency Lupa challenged Doria’s claim about the list and said a new queue of 96,000 had formed. Health secretary Wilson Pollara told the Guardian there is a “normal flow” of around 90,000 people waiting up to 60 days for such exams.



Immediately on taking office from the left-wing mayor Fernando Haddad, Doria announced a list of 55 privatisations of city assets, including a stadium, a samba arena, markets, parks and bus stations.

He also ordered city workers to paint over famous graffiti artworks, threatened to open some cycle paths to cars, and increased speed limits on two major arteries, in keeping with his campaign slogan: “Accelerate São Paulo”. (Accidents on those streets rose 43% from February–April, according to police figures.)

Before politics, Doria worked in television and advertising. He briefly ran both the São Paulo and Brazilian tourism agencies, and in 1992 founded the Doria Group, which combined event-planning, TV programming and magazine publishing. One of his publications was titled Caviar Lifestyle.

Joao Doria presents O Aprendiz, Brazil’s version of The Apprentice. Photograph: Rede Record

The Doria Group includes Lide, a network for powerful business leaders that hosts debates, seminars and events. According to Luiz Eurico Klotz, a music entrepreneur who has known Doria for decades, Lide was the first association of its kind in Brazil, and put Doria at the centre of Brazilian executive power.

“He was an innovator,” said Klotz. “He was there, coordinating everyone.”

Doria put his TV experience to use in his Beautiful City policy, a campaign to “clean up” São Paulo, which he pursues by dressing up in overalls to paint bus stops and lay bricks in highly orchestrated PR events, broadcast directly to his tens of thousands of followers on Facebook.

His adept use of social media helped him appeal to working-class voters. He trounced Haddad by winning votes from the kind of poorer paulistanos he said he had never encountered in person before, particularly in the city’s disadvantaged suburbs – the endless sprawl of highways, cinder block houses and favelas known as the periferia.

“I voted for him because he talked about improvements in São Paulo, improvements in education, in health,” said Fabiane de Oliveira, 20, an accounting assistant from the periferia neighbourhood Jaguaré. But she said Doria had let her down. “Up until now, that is not what he has done.”

Voters such as De Oliveira might traditionally have been expected to support the Workers’ party, but it has been battered by a sweeping scandal. Doria regularly attacks the party’s founder and two-time Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was recently sentenced to nearly 10 years for corruption and money-laundering – though has not yet been jailed.

João Doria images graffitied in protest on Paulista Avenue. Photograph: NurPhoto via Getty Images

“His dream was to become the anti-Lula candidate,” said Carlos Melo, a professor of political science at São Paulo business school Insper.

Doria also connected with the work ethic of this bustling commercial metropolis, in part by playing up hardships in his own biography. His father was exiled from Brazil during the military dictatorship; young João, his mother and his younger brother, Raul, returned to São Paulo two years later, penniless.

“We had a very difficult childhood and adolescence. At times, we did not have enough food to eat,” Raul Doria, now a film producer, said in an interview. To help keep the family afloat, the 13-year-old João started wearing suits and got a job at an advertising agency, his brother said. “He practically became my father,” Raul said.

The family was also forced to sell several paintings by the great Brazilian artist Di Cavalcanti. When Doria grew rich, he bought them back, and they now hang in his mansion in the upscale Jardim Europa neighbourhood.

He reacts when he feels he is being contradicted Paulo Cahim

Last year, at a campaign visit to his state government-run school, Doria cried as he inspected his old school records. He did not mention that he also attended Colégio Rio Branco, one of São Paulo’s most prestigious private schools. Pascowitch went to the same school and remembers a well-dressed, driven student.

“He has not changed; he has just got richer,” she said. “I knew he would do well, but not so well.”

Pascowitch said Doria polarises opinion because of his upper-class style. His conservative, smart-casual dress sense has earned him the nickname “Coxinha” – a deep-friend chicken thigh used as a pejorative term for upper-class right-wingers.



Doria poses for a selfie after clearing part of a city square in downtown São Paulo. Photograph: Lopes/Zuma Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

Matters weren’t helped by a 2016 interview in which his wife, Bia, an artist, gave from her Porsche, in which she compared herself to Eva Perón and said Brazil’s poor just needed a hug.

Doria has repeatedly described economic recovery as the solution to the country’s problems. His critics, however, say the problem is that he thinks too much like a CEO, and not enough like a mayor.

He draws heavily on his relationships with business: earlier this month, he shot a Facebook Live video while painting a pedestrian bridge that he boasted was paid for by private enterprise. But when one of his regional sub-mayors, Paulo Cahim, complained about a shortage of resources for flood prevention – heavy rains cause havoc every summer – Doria sacked him, saying: “Don’t complain, work.”

“He reacts when he feels he is being contradicted,” Cahim told the Guardian.

That is happening more frequently. Shortly after his election, Doria began flying around the country in his private jet in preparation for a possible run at the presidency next year. The trips backfired. An October poll by Datafolha saw his approval rating drop to 32%, down from 41% four months previously. More than three-quarters of respondents said Doria’s trips had benefited him more than the city.

“He has to learn as mayor. If he is already thinking about another job, of course it is not going to work,” said a São Paulo-based PSDB politician who spoke on condition of anonymity.

But Doria still does not rule out standing, and presented himself as a possible centrist option.

Farmers, food security activists and chefs prepare a banquet in downtown São Paulo, Brazil in protest at Doria’s farinata proposal. Photograph: NurPhoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images

“As a Brazilian, I will not omit my opinions and will fight so Brazil can have an election in 2018 with an alternative from the centre, of balance, of respect for the market,” he said in the interview. When told that his words sounded those of a presidential candidate, he replied: “That’s what you’re saying.”

Doria has blamed his fall in the polls on what he says is a $2.3bn (£1.7bn) deficit left by Haddad, but a 2016 analysis by the independent municipal court of accounts calculated the outgoing mayor left a $980m surplus. Doria said the previous administration had underestimated receipts and expenditures.

Initially, Doria froze more than a quarter of the education budget, despite a promise to end a 100,000-strong waiting list for places in creches. Now the plan is to deliver 65,000 new places by March, according to Alexandre Schneider, the education secretary. This may be ambitious given that, since the beginning of his mandate on 1 January, only 15,000 have been delivered.

Schneider said the city had been able to save $155m by reducing the age limit for children who receive free milk from 16 to 6, cutting back on school transport and renegotiating cleaning and security contracts. No longer frozen, the education budget will be spent by year end, Schneider said.

But some creches told the Guardian they had received less money. The Santos Mártires non-government group in Jardim Ângela, one of São Paulo’s poorest neighbourhoods, has suffered 30% cuts on rents it pays for four of the five creches it runs, said Vera Lessa, one of the group’s administrators – leaving the group out of pocket.

A municipal creche, the Vereador José Bustamante in Vila Ré, said it received less than half of a $2,650 federal transfer paid via the city because it already had funds in its account.

“We were worried because we would like to make improvements. This building is very old,” said Renata Perini, the creche manager.

She said Doria had done “very little” for the periferia where she lives. And she was dismayed by the farinata farce. “It was really bad,” she said. “Some of those who elected him already regret it.”

Additional reporting by Jonathan Watts

Guardian Cities is in São Paulo for a special series of in-depth reporting and live events. Share your experiences of the city in the comments below, on Facebook,Twitter and Instagram using #GuardianSaoPaulo, or by email to saopaulo.week@theguardian.com