It was the battle between Beckenbauer, Batman and the transsexual schoolteacher Sayonara. On October 7th they competed, together with 638 other candidates, for one of the 26 spots in the municipal council of the Brazilian city Uberlândia. They campaigned for months, because it’s not easy to stand out between hundreds of rivals. Batman and Beckenbauer had at least their names doing some work for them. And it was easy to notice Professora Sayonara because of her looks. But in the end, none of these candidates managed to get enough votes from the electorate.

A colorful election campaign in pictures.

In his normal life Batman works as a bouncer at a nightclub.

The Batman of Uberlândia fights against crime in his city.

Even his 5 year old daughter calls him Batman now.

His father called him Beckenbauer as he was a great fan of the German team.

Professora Sayonara poses in front of the school where she teaches geography.

Her students love Professora Sayonara.

Through them she tries to convince their parents to vote for her.

Sayonara wants more transsexuals in the classroom.

According to Sayonara, to compete is more important than to win. She wants to show that transsexuals also do positive things and don’t always work as prostitutes.

One last hug for Professora Sayonara to wish her good luck.

One of the many campaign cars with a large sound system on the roof.

Uberlândia, a city of more than 600.000 people.

Last week, Marc and I made this radio report for the NOS about the battle between Batman, Beckenbauer and Professora Sayonara (in Dutch).

Read also Marc’s blog about the elections in Brazil (in Dutch):
http://weblogs.nos.nl/latijns-amerika/2012/10/06/batman-tegen-beckenbauer/

And his blog about the making of our radio report (in Dutch):
http://marcbessems.nl/2012/10/07/achter-de-schermen-bij-batman/