Populism can take a left-wing or right-wing shape depending on the histories and circumstances of particular countries, although “broadly speaking left-wing populism combines with socialism, right-wing populism with nationalism”.

Some achievements were simply creating new problems. Poorer Brazilians may have been buying more cars and travelling to work in greater comfort, but they were also experiencing the misery of São Paulo’s traffic jams. Brazil’s highway infrastructure was simply not keeping pace with the volume of traffic. Between 2002 and 2012 the numbers of cars on

Brazil was forced to reschedule its foreign debts in 1983, lost access to international capital markets for several years, and for nearly two decades struggled with its external accounts. Every time the economy grew, it had to import more. In turn, this increased the trade gap, depressing the local currency, increasing the prices of imported goods

China was another crunch issue. The foreign minister Ernesto Araújo wanted to reduce ties with China and talked about promoting links with India, Japan and South Korea. Bolsonaro himself had protested during his campaign that China was buying up Brazil and had objected to the way it was making strategic investments in areas such as minerals and

On 23 March 2021 – as this book was going to press – the Supreme Court ruled (by three votes to two) that Lula had not been treated impartially by the Curitiba court.

Urged on by the government, Petrobras had agreed to ambitious plans to build new refineries both in Brazil and overseas. Many of these initiatives were half-baked, designed to serve political rather than business purposes. Petrobras wasted vast amounts of money, either overpaying for existing refineries or exceeding budgets for new projects. In

Pentecostalism places special importance on the Holy Spirit, an invisible divine force (the third ‘person’ of the Christian divine Trinity) that binds Christ’s followers or disciples to God. This religious tradition derives its name from Pentecost, when according to the biblical Acts of the Apostles the Holy Spirit infused the spirits of Jesus’

According to Google Trends, in September 2018 the search for the words ‘gay kit’ was the most popular in the country. After the first round paved the way for a two-way run-off between Bolsonaro and Haddad, the Bolsonaro media team went into overdrive, pumping out social media material that distorted the left-wing team’s support for gender rights

In 2011 more than 900,000 plastic surgery operations were carried out in Brazil, a number second only to the United States. New class C customers were a key factor in the increase in procedures, which were up nearly fivefold since 2001.