Renato Freitas: The Outsider Curitiba Can’t Ignore
Tracing the unpolished, improbable rise of a politician who doesn’t know how to bow.
Curitiba, with its manicured sidewalks and clockwork bus lanes, has built an image of itself as Brazil’s European outpost—efficient, polished, self-assured. But images are fragile things. Sometimes all it takes is one person refusing to fit the frame to reveal how narrow it really is.
Renato Freitas—afro, sneakers, Malcolm X T-shirts—doesn’t just refuse to play the role. He rewrites it. In 2022, he was expelled from office in a move that spoke less about his so-called breach of decorum and more about the discomfort he brought into a chamber unaccustomed to people like him. The Supreme Court later reversed the decision, but the message had already landed: here was a politician who treated politics like a living, breathing conversation instead of a staged ceremony.
Curitiba has perfected the art of keeping things neat—streets swept, speeches polished, differences politely hidden. Freitas doesn’t hide. He speaks in the rhythms of the street, dresses in the language of defiance, and brings a sense of reality to rooms that too often run on artifice. He’s a reminder that politics isn’t about looking the part—it’s about showing up as yourself, even when the space was never built for you.
His journey from Piraquara—a suburb defined by its prison—to the legislative floor is less a rise to power than an argument in motion. It’s the argument that lived experience is as valuable as academic credentials, that grit is as legitimate as pedigree.
When he joined a protest inside the Church of the Black Men—an 18th-century building constructed by enslaved Africans—he turned symbolism into action. His opponents called it disrespect; his supporters saw it as truth. The resulting expulsion, legal battle, and reinstatement could have drained anyone else. Freitas came back louder.
Whether he likes it or not, Freitas has become a touchstone—a way of asking what politics could be if it welcomed more voices like his. He doesn’t promise to fix everything, but he makes the room feel less distant from the street. And in a country where cynicism toward politics is practically a national pastime, that’s no small thing.
Thanks, Ricardo, for showing that politics can be better—not cleaner in the cosmetic sense, but richer, messier, more honest. Whether you win every fight or not, you’ve already changed what’s possible just by walking through the door and refusing to leave your identity at the threshold.
