Brazil’s silent majority has not been swept up by the anti-Rousseff protests
Brazil’s silent majority has not been swept up by the anti-Rousseff protests
Rodrigo Nunes
Thursday 7 April 2016 12.53 EDT
There is one curious paradox that recurs with almost comical regularity in neoliberalised public debate. On the one hand we are told to think of voters as rational, utility-maximising actors. On the other, every time a politician or party offers the majority of the population more than their rivals do, pundits will invariably start groping around for “irrational” causes to explain popularity.
Thus, one might hear that the left-leaning Latin American governments of the last decade were successful because of some elusive property like “populism” or a magical cause like “the need for father figures” (a thinly veiled racist cliche if ever there were one). The least-ventilated hypothesis is always precisely the one that follows directly from the theory: that, in voting for those governments, the majority of the population were simply making what was the most rational choice for them.
According to the latest polls, 68% of Brazilians now support the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, while her approval rates are at 10%. What’s more, the polls indicate that the rejection of her government is more or less evenly distributed across the social spectrum. If one considers that Brazil is presently going through its worst political crisis in over a decade – and also that the more ideological elements of the upper class were rabidly against Rousseff’s Workers’ party (PT), even while it presided over the country’s greatest economic bonanza since the 1970s – one conclusion suggests itself: throughout the PT years, the poor were the most rational portion of the Brazilian electorate. Yet this does not mean that they are now out on the streets demanding change.
Two symmetrical mistakes are often made: either deducing from the rather homogeneous social composition of the anti-government protests that dissatisfaction with the government is restricted to the upper classes; or deducing from the polls that those protests represent the majority of Brazilians. The truth is somewhere in the middle: while there are many reasons to be against Rousseff, the views articulated most visibly on the street and in the media are not necessarily the most widely shared.
If one compares the numbers of those who have attended pro-impeachment demonstrations with the much larger contingent that declares itself dissatisfied, what becomes evident is a new silent majority in Brazilian politics: neither with the government nor actively against it.
The lion’s share of this silent majority certainly benefited the most from the PT’s first three terms in power. They are those whose purchasing power grew exponentially over the past decade, but who also ran up against the limits of still poor public services; those who experienced increased opportunities for themselves and for their children, but who are now rightfully concerned that a historic window might be closing, and that the new expectations that had opened up for them will be frustrated.
More:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/07/brazil-silent-majority-opposition-dilma-rousseff-anti-corruption-upper-classes
