throughout 2012 and well into 2013, Rousseff remained relatively popular. Indeed, during 2012 her ratings improved. With each opinion poll she became more confident and assertive and less tolerant of criticism and counter-arguments. “Now nobody is going to be able to put up with her”, said Giles Azevedo, Rousseff’s chief of staff and one of her clo

Critics would claim that Lula had been lucky. During the 1990s his party had opposed both the Real Plan and the subsequent rounds of fiscal austerity that had eventually vanquished inflation. The trade boom – from which his government benefited – was mainly a result of China’s own growth and opening to world markets, and the neat fit between this a

One columnist called him the “president of small things”.24 In her colourful account of Bolsonaro’s crises, Thaís Oyama notes that big – and perhaps more abstract – policy questions were of no interest to Brazil’s leader. She quotes an adviser who saw Paulo Guedes try to explain macro-economic ideas to Bolsonaro during the election campaign. “It wa

When I interviewed him in 2006, Lula da Silva talked a lot about this combination of economic stability and trade growth. He had grown up on a farm in rural Pernambuco in the north-east, and in the early 1950s made the long trip to São Paulo with his mother and brothers on the back of a lorry. During his teens, Lula had sold oranges and peanuts at

As Brazil prepared for the 2010 election, Lula was ebullient. The success of the country’s bids to host the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games were seen as markers of Brazil’s status as a global power. Brazilian diplomats were at the helm of the World Trade Organization and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. The Brazilian army had led a