Rio Carnival comes under threat after swingeing budget cuts from new Evangelical mayor

Next year’s Rio Carnival is under threat over drastic budget cuts by the city’s new Evangelical mayor, who has been accused of acting on his conservative religious views.

Marcelo Crivella is a gospel singer and evangelical bishop who took office in January on a platform that included a promise to maintain financial support to the Carnival.

But he has since halved public funding for each of Rio’s 13 leading samba schools, who now say the budget cuts make it financially unviable to organise next year’s parades.

“The schools have concluded that with this 50 per cent reduction in their funds for preparing and producing Carnival, it will not be possible for them to parade,” Jorge Castanheira, the president of the LIESA association of top samba schools, told local media organization Globo.

Mr Crivella has said he will use the money saved -  one million reais (about £250,000) for each school -  to fund meals for children at public daycare centres.

The samba schools say the celebrations, which feature dozens of elaborately designed floats and thousands of dancers in glittering, multi-coloured costumes and attract tourists from around the world, more than repay their subsidy.

According to official tourism board Riotur, this year’s week-long festival attracted 1.1 million tourists, who spent a total of three billion reais partying in the city.

The samba schools and their supporters have accused Mr Crivella of being swayed by his religious convictions.

In contrast to Eduardo Paes, his party-going predecessor who brought the Olympic Games to Rio, Mr Crivella pointedly stayed away from this year’s parades in the Sambadrome, the first time the mayor has not attended since 1984.

Mr Crivella, who has said that homosexuality is a sin, has also refused to finance the city’s Gay Pride parades with public money.

Mr Crivella has denied that his religion has been a factor in the decision to cut funding. "Not at all. It is only to do with the recession that Rio is going through," he told reporters this week.

Rio’s annual Carnival festivities are one of the few remaining bright spots in the local economy. Since the closing ceremony of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, the home city of Christ the Redeemer and Sugarloaf Mountain has descended ever deeper into economic chaos.

The costs of holding the Games, coupled with a decline in royalties from offshore oil and an increase in pension costs, have plunged the state into a fiscal crisis.

State authorities have defaulted on debt payments and often pay civil servants months in arrears. Unemployment has increased by almost 50 per cent in just one year. The number of people living on the city’s streets has almost tripled since 2013, while law and order has deteriorated dramatically: there were more than 2,400 violent deaths in the state in the first four months of the year.

To restore order to public finances, the state government is implementing a hugely unpopular austerity programme, raising indirect taxes and social security contributions while slashing public sector salaries and social benefits.