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Weekly Report - 15 March 2012 (WR-12-11)

BRAZIL: The coalition consumes itself

The same day as Brazil’s football chief Ricardo Teixeira finally stepped aside (after years of controversy finally caught up with him), President Rousseff put some more members of her political team on the bench. There are several lines of thought doing the rounds in Brasília. One is that without former president Lula da Silva (2003-2010) at the helm, the unwieldy ruling coalition (of 16 parties in all) is ungovernable. A second is that President Rousseff is caught in a Catch-22 situation between Lula’s governing style – which involved using his trade unionist skills to great effect behind the scenes to take advantage of Brazil’s clientelist politics – and her preferred meritocratic management style. A third is that in the absence of any real opposition, (the coalition holds 80% of the seats in the federal parliament), the heterogeneous alliance has become its own worst enemy, and is in danger of devouring itself ahead of municipal elections in October. This contest, of course, is the prelude to the general election in 2014.

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