miércoles, 13 de junio de 2018

miércoles, junio 13, 2018

Too soon to party

How a strike by lorry drivers will shape Brazil’s elections

The stoppage has made sober fiscal policies more necessary, and less likely


A SEMBLANCE of normality returned to São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city, after a ten-day strike by lorry drivers that had paralysed traffic, shut down petrol stations and emptied grocery-store shelves. The annual gay-pride parade, held on June 3rd, brought 3m people to Avenida Paulista, the city’s main street. Football fans packed bars to watch Brazil’s team play a World Cup warm-up game against Croatia.

But this resumption of ordinary life is deceptive. The drivers’ strike, called to protest against higher fuel prices, marks an ominous beginning to a political season that will culminate in national elections in October. It has demonstrated Brazilians’ taste for irresponsible policies and boosted the prospects of the most extreme candidate in the presidential race, Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing former army Captain.

It also showed that the next president will have a hard time enacting the reforms needed to maintain economic stability. The strike ended only after Michel Temer, the country’s unpopular president, agreed to subsidise diesel for 60 days and to adjust its price monthly rather than daily. That prompted the resignation on June 1st of Pedro Parente as chief executive of Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company, which had raised prices in response to higher international oil prices and a weaker real. The strike could prove to be a watershed moment for the elections, says Pablo Ortellado, a professor of public policy at the University of São Paulo.

Although the lorry-drivers’ rebellion made life miserable, 87% of Brazilians supported it, according to Datafolha, a pollster. As well as calling for cheaper fuel, many drivers demanded a crackdown on corruption and crime, which have dominated headlines under recent administrations, including that of Mr Temer. Petrobras has been a byword for graft. Under earlier bosses it was the conduit for enormous bribes paid by construction companies to politicians. Celso Rogerio Gomez das Neves, a mechanic taking a break at a corner bar in São Paulo, admits that Petrobras raised prices to compensate for higher costs, but also thinks that its executives were “stealing from the Brazilian people”.

Fear of Jair

Some drivers hung banners from their cabs demanding “military intervention” to deal with crime and corruption. Far-right groups dominated online discussion of those themes during the strike, according to an analysis by a data lab run by Fabio Malini, a scholar of internet culture at the Federal University of Espírito Santo. The digital savvy of the strikers, who organised through thousands of interconnected WhatsApp groups, foreshadows the role that social media are likely to play in the presidential election, says Mr Malini.

Both the ideology and the techie tactics have echoes in the campaign of Mr Bolsonaro, whose Social Liberal Party counts for almost nothing but whose Facebook page has 5.5m followers. He tweeted support for the drivers but distanced himself from appeals for political intervention by the army. Military rule might “return by the ballot”, meaning through the generals that he plans to appoint to his cabinet if he is elected, he told reporters at an evangelical “march for Jesus” on May 31st.

No candidate reflects better the electorate’s anti-establishment mood. The proportion of Brazilians saying that “traditional political parties do not care about people like me” jumped from 69% in November 2016 to 86% in March this year, according to IPSOS Global, a pollster. The share who think Brazil needs “a strong leader who will break the rules” rose from 48% to 89%. Mr Bolsonaro “feeds off fear and hopelessness”, says Cláudio Couto, a political scientist.

His view that “a gay son needs a beating” appeals to some social conservatives. His iron-fisted approach to crime (he would give police a “blank cheque” to shoot miscreants) is popular with a bigger group. Like Donald Trump, or Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, he gets points for supposedly plain speaking. “He says what he thinks,” says a taxi driver in São Paulo as he drops off a carful of revellers clad in rainbow colours at the pride parade.

In the first nationwide poll since the strike of voting intentions for the first round of the presidential election, Mr Bolsonaro came out ahead against three different lists of potential rivals, with 21-25% of the vote. Three-quarters of his supporters say they will not change their vote before election day. The only politician who outpolls him is Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a left-wing former president. But he is in jail for corruption and is unlikely to be able to run.

Mr Bolsonaro’s closest rival is Ciro Gomes, a centre-left former governor who occasionally sounds like a populist. He gets the support of 11-12% of voters. That would rise if Lula endorses him. Geraldo Alckmin, the centrist former governor of the state of São Paulo, is backed by just 6-7% of voters. His Facebook page has 900,000 followers, about a sixth of the number that Mr Bolsonaro’s has.

Mr Alckmin’s supporters argue that he will do much better than the polls suggest. His Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB) has a large number of seats in congress, which will entitle him to lots of free advertising time on television and public money for his campaign. The PSDB can add to that by forming coalitions; last week it opened negotiations in congress with centre-right parties. By early August, Brazilians will come to realise that Mr Alckmin, who trained as an anaesthesiologist, is a “doctor” for the country’s economic and political ills, says Luiz Felipe d’Avila, an adviser. Voters “are more rational than irrational”, he believes.

The financial markets hope that is true. Mr Alckmin is the only one of the leading candidates with any enthusiasm for the programme of economic reforms begun by Mr Temer, which helped pull Brazil out of its worst-ever recession. Mr Temer pushed through a constitutional amendment to freeze government spending in real terms and liberalised the labour market. But he has failed to curb pension spending, the main long-term threat to the budget. His cave-in on diesel prices will add to the fiscal burden that the next president will inherit. The lorry drivers have made it more urgent that Brazil elect a reformer as president in October. They have also made that less likely.

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