Dead man's boots

There is an old phrase that means a position/trade is very hard to advance within because you have to wait for the person above you to leave or die in order to take their place, hence 'dead man's boots'.
Why am I talking of some smelly fellas footwear? Well, being the simple Englishman that I am, I naturally understood that when the Mayor (or President) of Lodz was booted out (excuse the over use of foot related vocabulary, but I couldn't resist) that a new one would be elected. Oh how wrong I was.
It is only due to a passing remark of a colleague that the truth was unveiled to this intrepid little explorer. For the best part of a year, Lodz has been in the hands of a prime-ministerial stand-in. PM Tusk simply appointed some bloke to do the job. Problem was that as an un-elected official he does not/did not hold all the powers of a full president.
The up-shot: money from one department can't be re-assigned to another etc... and Lodz remains in a mess. Only now after 9 months do we have a new PO President-elect. Hanna Zdanowska won the run-offs against SLD Dariusza Jońskiego with a roughly 60/40 split of the votes. That said only only 22.34 percent of the electorate turned out to vote and so 60% is not much, but hey!
Let's see what President Zdanowska is able to do with Lodz's often chaotic administration.