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Brazil: The next 10 years
Introduction
This report has been written in what could be a good moment for long-range reflection about Brazil. After years of economic difficulty, corruption scandals, and political upheavals (including the impeachment of a sitting President), Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right candidate, has won the October 2018 elections with a comfortable majority and is poised to take office on 1 January 2019. If we roll back the clock to ten years ago, there couldn’t be a bigger contrast. Back then Brazil appeared to be in a comparatively much better state, with a strong economy riding the commodity export boom and a president, the left-wing Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, enjoying high opinion poll ratings. Today’s Brazil appears to be economically weaker, socially divided, and politically polarised. Lula is in prison, retaining some level of support around the country, but now detested by many middle-class voters who have turned decisively to the Right. Clearly, the last decade saw things get a lot worse for Brazil. Part of the idea of this report is to ask what the next ten years may hold. If it took a decade for a once-confident left-wing project for the country to collapse and unravel, might the next ten years turn out to be about the emergence of a rival right-wing project? That is certainly a possibility to examine, but the key to Brazil’s future is not necessarily best seen through the prism of an ideological left-right debate.
