Story highlights Rio's new mayor is a former evangelical bishop

The conservative's win is seen as a blow to Brazil's leftist parties

Social activists are concerned with the new mayor's stance on LGBT rights

Rio de Janeiro (CNN) Rio de Janeiro, the city of sunshine and samba, elected a former evangelical bishop mayor in a municipal election that signals Brazil's politics are shifting right after 13 years of national leftist rule.

Marcelo Crivella, a conservative senator who is affiliated with an influential megachurch, won a runoff election Sunday with nearly 60% of the vote, beating runner-up Marcelo Freixo, a socialist state deputy and former history teacher, by nearly 20 percentage points.

"We're currently witnessing a fragmentation and reconfirmation of politics in Brazil," said Michael Mohallem, a law and political sciences professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation.

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Sunday's election was a battle of the extremes: on the right Crivella's conservative Brazilian Republican Party, on the left Brazil's Socialist Party. None of the center-leaning parties that had traditionally been elected to power in the country's second-largest city made it past the first round of voting in early October.

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