Who is Brazil's potential 2018 candidate João Doria?

Political outsider João Doria Junior (pictured), the mayor of Brazil's biggest city, said he may enter the 2018 presidential race, amid a wave of anti-politician sentiment across Latin America's largest economy.

Elected last year, Doria beat his leftist opponent, São Paulo incumbent mayor Fernando Haddad, in the first round of the elections. The victory underscored the highly negative sentiment toward leftist leaders among Brazilians.

Questioned during an interview with Bloomberg if he would accept the presidential nomination from his centrist PSDB party, he responded, "Respecting democracy, why not?"

Doria, a 59 year-old marketing executive and former TV host, became mayor after receiving the strong support of São Paulo governor and fellow PSDB member Geraldo Alckmin, winning his first election.

Political observers branded him as a political outsider, and Doria made a point in last year's campaign of stressing how he would run the city as a manager. When asked by a reporter about comparisons to then US presidential candidate Donald Trump – given that he hosted the Brazilian version of the reality show The Apprentice, which Trump leveraged to launch his own political career – Doria said he was more like former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Growing signs of Doria's presidential ambitions opens a dispute inside PSDB, as Alckmin – who ran for president a decade ago – remains the odds-on favorite to win the party's nomination.

Despite the potential internal struggle, PSDB is better positioned than its rivals – the leftist workers' party (PT) and President Michel Temer's center-right PMDB party – to reap the benefits of anticorruption probes that have ensnared prominent leftist and ruling party politicians, including popular former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Brazil's presidential election is expected to take place in October 2018.