What began as a protest over rising bus fares has become a far wider movement, bringing more than a million people on the streets of Brazil. How will the government respond?
This is, essentially, a middle-class protest movement: those on the streets do not hail from the desperate poverty of Brazil’s favelas. they are college-educated, relatively well off, fluent in social media.
The Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, who has cancelled a trip to Japan to deal with the crisis, is holding an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss her next move.
Responding to a popular protest movement presents something of a dilemma for Rousseff, a former Marxist guerrilla who was elected on a platform of social change.
Her Workers Party, or PT, has held the presidency for more than a decade, raising some 40 million people out of poverty and overseeing a rapid economic boom. She originally tried supporting the demonstrators, saying she was proud of them.
The party’s president, Rui Falcao, called on supporters to join in, in comments on his personal website. “The PT is going to the street! Fighting for public transportation is a historical banner of the PT!”
But that tactic seems to have backfired. Any PT activists who did try taking to the street found themselves the target of angry criticism from the rest of the crowds, especially since the harsh police crackdown, including the death of one man who was run over by a car.
The protests themselves have turned increasingly violent, while more people have been drawn out onto the streets to fight against what they see as an attack on free expression.
Daniel Guimaraes, from the Free Fare Movement, a group which began in 2006 with a handful of activists and has grown into one of the main planks of this current wave of protests, condemned the government’s change in attitude.
“First they called us vandals, then they said we didn’t count because we had so many students, then they tried police repression,” he said.
The sheer scale of the demonstrations – as well as their intensity – is rare in Brazil, with its near-full employment and rising wages. But there’s a growing sense of disillusionment with the authorities, despite their relatively healthy popularity ratings.
A poll carried out on Wednesday gave Rousseff’s party some 55 per cent in support, although that figure is slipping, along with Brazil’s sliding currency – now at its lowest level since the financial crisis of 2009.
The original grievance over fare rises has not been placated, despite the decision to reverse the increases in Brazil’s major cities. Instead, a disparate range of other causes have merged into one.
This is, at the same time, a movement against official corruption, prompted by a sense that ordinary people are suffering from the soaring inflation while politicians line their own pockets. And there is a feeling that the fruits of Brazil’s boom have been squandered on sporting largesse.
That is focused not just on next summer’s World Cup, as costs soar to more than £8m, but also on 2016 Olympic Games. One protester was seen demanding “We want Fifa-quality hospitals too!” while another complained “If my child gets sick, I can’t take him to a stadium.”
While this may be more like Occupy Wall Street – leaderless and inchoate – than the Arab Spring, it is certainly an example of this new kind of grassroots movement, fuelled and made real by social media.
Brazil has one of the highest rates of social media usage in the world, and the government has been left lagging far behind the new reality. Laurindo Leal Filho, sociology professor at the University of Sao Paulo, told the New York Times:
“We saw an exhaustion of old political models, including of the (Workers’ Party) government, which itself sprang out of social movements. It’s become institutionalised and didn’t create new channels for people to communicate directly with power, as people are now demanding.”
The paper describes how savvy young protesters are creating their own networks, on the streets and on the hoof. One group, it reports, “has been circulating through the streets with smartphones, cameras and a generator held in a supermarket cart – a makeshift, roving production studio.”
And a YouTube video posted by 23-year-old film director Carla Dauden (see below), calling on her fellow Brazilians to boycott the World Cup in protest over the country’s growing economic inequality, has already attracted more than 2.5 million hits.
This, then, is the new kind of popular uprising. One that is leaving Brazil’s former Marxist revolutionaries struggling to respond.