Kassab, the most powerful man in Brazil you’ve never heard of
Gilberto Kassab is Brazil's ultimate éminence grise, heading a party that has consistently grown its congressional and municipal footprint.
The first round of municipal elections in Brazil, which took place on October 6 in all 5,500 cities save for the capital Brasília, had several winners. But one man, Gilberto Kassab, emerged as the biggest winner of them all.
This is very accurate. This guy has not held a role in politics for a long time, but he is like the master of puppets, controlling everything behind the curtains.
Powerful and dangerous. A snake
Those types tend not to put themselves out front. They prefer to pull the strings without too many eyes on them.
He has not run for an election since 2008. Still, he holds the purse strings of the Social Democratic Party (PSD), which, for the first time, elected the most mayors in the country: 888, or about 15 percent of the total, not to mention its candidates who qualified for a runoff to take place on October 27 in many of the country’s biggest cities.
Despite his immense political clout, Mr. Kassab remains unknown to most Brazilians.
Mr. Kassab, age 64, is the fifth of seven children of a physician and a teacher. After graduating in both economics and civil engineering, he worked as a real estate agent before starting his political career as a councilman in São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city, in 1993. It took off very fast.
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