ONE BRAZIL IS FED UP WITH DILMA ROUSSEFF

Why does Brazil still remain one single political unit? Nobody else seems to be asking that. But the idea of unit is what is puzzling. 

As a professor from Saint Gallen's University remarked in surprise when we met in São Paulo late last year, 'You have all lots of people here!' He stressed the economic disparities. But that is just one factor. These days the country is profoundly divided into two, and the fracture is not to be overcome so simply as some might wish for.

One part will vote for Dilma again.The other is weary of Dilma and its red party, PT.
The former lives on government stipend. The latter has grown to feel as the unduly provider of an excessive stipend to the government, mainly through taxes. 

Geographically, the two groups are also apart. The Northeast is likely to make Dilma president again. The real Brazilian middle class is based in the Southeast and South and has been mourning around even before the corpse emerges in October (when presidential elections are due).


As the corpse is eventually delivered, the result, we argue, will not be the end of a dispute. The next polls will unlikely be rendered a final sentence to comply with, which shapes a fundamental distinction in comparison with the picture in 2010.

During the 2013 end-of-year gathering of Febraban (Federation of Brazilian Banks), Sonia Racy, who holds a daily column in O Estado de S.Paulo, eavesdropped "catastrophic and chaotic" views from the 400 bankers about to enjoy lunch at a famous hotel in that city. 

She reported (06/12/2013) that for the first time in ten years of such celebration, a gloomy atmosphere was felt - so much so that those 'representatives of the market' would not 'even care enough to engage in complaining'. 

One less pessimistic voice, Racy adds, insistently proclaimed that 2013 meant a relief - the last year in the long political career of José Sarney. But even that banker admitted such milestone was tarnished by a 'disadvantage': Dilma is likely to be re-ellected in 2014.

Dilma herself looks down. Months ago she was quoted complaining that running the country was not a piece of cake. That was before June, when the massive demonstrations erupted. 

By now Dilma must be fully convinced that staying in power - allegedly for the sake of 'the poor' (how the Brazilian 'new middle class' is referred to when tiredness despises coherence and ruins the show) - is bound to become a whole cake, and one very hard to digest. 

I also got evidence that Brazil is an upset stomach already. I happened to hear a new-middle-class man as he spoke up in the street the other day: 'I wish Brazil would soon be eliminated from the Cup.'

That was the very first time I heard such a 1929-like depressing remark from a Brazilian, concerning the FIFA tournament. The man lives in São Paulo, not in the Northeast. He is not well educated, but one learns from the atmosphere which, in the Brazil who houses Febraban (now a catchword for the lucid and depressed in the country), sternly announces, 'There will be no World Cup'.

If 'Febraban' made up the majority in voting terms, there would not be second-time Dilma. Layers in the indigestible cake will mount as many can be expected to resume an old agenda that puts the very election system into question.

But then what? The formal unit of the country will again get in the way of any major institutional progress. And curiously, the key question will not be heard around - why Brazil will not even contest its unit?