Dilma is still ahead in election poll

Even with all the protests, president Dilma would be elected in the first round of the presidential elections this year, according to the latest survey from Datafolha published this sunday. Dilma ranks first with 43% to 47% of the votes in different scenarios with different competitors, making more than the sum of all the other candidates for president. The result points to a stable perspective from the last evaluation of Dilma electoral performance and according to Folha analysis means that it is Dilma that should run as a candidate for PT (the Worker's Party) and not former president Lula. This was received as good news to the government because it shows that president Dilma's popularity recovered from the past results on october lat year when her vote intention was in 42%.

Dilma will face the challenge of keeping the economy
growing while avoiding inflation

In spite of the good numbers, Dilma still has some challenges ahead. Her negative evaluation went up from the previous survey, showing that her current popularity might fall in the future. The risks with the economy downturn (with the current strategy from the Central Bank to reduce the economic growth in order to control inflation) and the possible negative impacts of protests in the World Cup may force a second round of the elections in the end of October.

Former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, from the social democrat party (PSDB), the biggest rival of PT, bets against Dilma in an interview published this weekend in El País Brasil, given to my former  boss Carla Jimenez and to Luis Prados. Cardoso makes an interesting diagnosis of the current state of affairs in Brazil: PT has lost the momentum to carry on the reforms when the country faced a window of opportunity -- as a matter of fact, the government never saw it as a window of opportunity but rather as a permanent state that, as we all know, already passed. He says, though, that if it was not the case that the country was as good as international investors thought it was in the past, it is not as bad as they think now. He claims we need a better positioning in Latin American politics (which now has an all new economic bloc: the Pacific Alliance) and expects the current dissatisfaction now common in the middle class and businessmen will be also passed on to the greater part of the population as the campaign goes on.

Protests
Enough with politics. Now back to the protests. This weekend a new set of protests against the World Cup and now the new wave of hikes in the bus tariff (that should happen in all major capitals by the end of the year) has again ended in violence. This time the controversial attitudes came out of São Paulo police and its new "ninja force"(policemen that know their ways in martial arts, and carry no guns) when they started to arrest and remove protesters based only in suspicions -- this was criticized by some lawyers because it would go against Brazilian Constitution that only allows police to act based on facts. Five journalists were taken down by these same policemen, carried out of the protests and later let go when the Police chief found out they were working to cover the protests. Among them was my former O Globo colleague and friend, Sergio Roxo. Interesting enough, as Roxo wrote in O Globo, the the protest in São Paulo ended with 6 injured people, among them 4 cops, one of which broke his arm while trying to immobilize a protester.

Press versus Black Blocs

Since the protests started on june 2013, the press has been a target of some of the revolted young people. Last week, after the journalist from TV Bandeirantes, Santiago Andrade, died on consequence of a firework explosion detonated by one of the Black Bloc protesters, this confront was more than evident. On one side we had still some of the same voices (that supported the violence of Black Blocs from the beginning) trying to downsize the meaning of the death, at the same time we had somewhat an overreaction on part of the media.

Before going further on this issue it is necessary to clarify somethings. The press has always been in the radar of leftist movement's critic in Brazil. And it is not without any reason: part of Brazilian press supported the military cup of 1964 (namely through the work of a liberal journalist called Carlos Lacerda, that latter turned against the regime) and a greater part just omitted the critic to the regime in order to keep running. Globo Television is seeing as a member of the later, especially after they called a immense manifestation for the direct presidential election as a commemoration of the city of São Paulo's anniversary. 

This is on the roots of the anger against the media. At almost all the manifestations and protests I covered at some point I could hear protesters shouting: "Fora Rede Globo, o povo não é bobo"(something like "Go away Globo Network, people are not stupid"). Not surprisingly protesters attacked reporters from day one, but maybe because the violence coming from the police was bigger (with a photographer losing the vision of one of his eyes due to a rubber bullet), the press focused its attention to the violence from the police. Latter, namely in Rio, O Globo started covering more closely the actions of Black Blocks that managed to remove the multitudes of protesters from the streets through their violence (the phrase if from a musical producer from Rio, I just borrowed). 

This week main TV news shows devoted a lot of time to give a proper dimension of Santiago's death, and ask for Justice (16 minutes in Jornal Nacional, of Globo TV, and 15 minutes in the Jornal da Band, of the Bandeirantes television, where Santiago worked). The two young Black Blocs responsible for the death were quickly arrested, in Brasilia, deputies were quick in drafting laws against protests, from an intelligent one that typifies the crime of disorder (allowing the police to actually remove people with rocks and dangerous behaviors from the protests, something they couldn't do due to a gap in legislation) to extremely dangerous ones, such as the one that relates protests to terrorist activity. 

That's not part of the overreaction, yet. For me, the overreaction came with the attempt of putting the decentralized group of the Black Blocs as part of a leftist movement aimed to create chaos on the verge of the World Cup. Newspapers quickly assumed, basing on vague an unconfirmed declarations, that the Black Blocs were connected to PSOL (a leftist party, that is very active in the protests) and quickly connected them with a Rio deputy, Marcelo Freixo.

The press steps back
Today, on their sunday edition, both Folha de S. Paulo, and part of O Globo, acknowledge part of the overreaction, which is a good thing. Folha devotes a full page to understand the movements behind the protests, and differentiate leftist, anarchist and other independent social movements from the Black Blocs. Folha also ran a survey in Rio that shows that more than 70% of the people still supports the protests, event almost 100% (I believe 98% or so) are against any act of violence from protesters and the police. Stories about the need to train better the police also were published during the week, which is also aiming to the correct direction.

The impression I get, looking from a big distance, is that finally the Black Bloc has lost its momentum. The group seduced part of young people that don't see any chance of manifesting themselves in the country's democracy, as correctly pointed out Vladimir Safatle, on Globo News this week. It is not the case that the country has no means of participating, we actually have a lot of institutionalized ways of participating, but they are opaque to the vast majority of the population. In the roots of this problem is the traditional lack of political participation among the whole population and the huge disbelief in the political parties (a disbelief that is more or less occurring also in developed countries). 

Some ponderations

Ramona Rodriguez, cuban doctor asked for
political refuge in Brazil this week

There are two things that upset me about the media and social media coverage in Brazil. On the one hand, mainstream media often is too critical and lacks a bit of context on the government decision. This, on the other hand, leads people on social media to call the whole media conservatives and fuel protesters to physically harm journalist (as this week was seen with the TV Bandeirantes cameraman hit by a bomb).

Over the past two weeks I've seen examples on both sides of this sort of thing. Two weeks ago, TV show Manhattan Connection interviewed Luiza Trajano, owner of one of the biggest store chains in Brazil, Magazine Luiza. One of the journalists, Diogo Mainardi, speaking directly from Italy where he now lives, was saying Ms. Trajano that her sector was living a crisis. She repeatedly said that was not the case, but he insisted and then she showed him the actual numbers, that were showing an increase in sales at the end of last year. 

The stress of negative points on Business journalism is something the Brazilian press does more often than we think. This is why the Central Bank disregarded the press criticism when it first cut down the interest rates. At that time it was the right thing to do, and it worked. Maybe if the press weren't so over critic, the government would listen to it more often, and maybe it would avoid the current stagflation we are facing. 

The other example occurred this week. When a great set of bad news for the government rightfully gained the newspapers. Let’s start from the beginning. A blackout (I believe the third of its kind), reached most of the country on Tuesday followed by the request for political refugee from a Cuban doctor, part of the government program (one of the many inspired by Hugo Chávez, due to its political profits in terms of votes) Mais Médicos (more doctors), and the arrest of Henrique Pizzolato, former executive of Banco do Brazil and member of the Workers Party in Italy. Immediately, bloggers and government supporters went out to say that the blackout was an isolated event (it always is), that the cuban doctor is just one among 7,400 others who are doing their jobs and so on.  It's sad to see that the same flaws are repeating, and that apparently they are not seen as a problem to some supporters of the government. 

This pretty much resumes the events of the past two weeks, I wish I could have written in more depth of all of them, but time is short in this year. Hopefully from now on the weekly posting will continue.