Brazilian President’s Attempts to Placate Protesters Backfire
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Version 0 of 1. RIO DE JANEIRO — First she wanted to convoke a constitutional assembly, then she favored holding a plebiscite. Her government has promised more money for education and health care, to be paid for from oil royalties that do not yet exist. Her advisers have floated ideas like reducing the number of cabinet ministers from the current ungainly 39 and making it easier for the public to introduce legislation by petition. President Dilma Rousseff has tried to defuse the protests that have rocked the streets of Brazil by seemingly granting the demonstrators what they want. But nearly every step she has taken has backfired, increasing public dissatisfaction with her performance. A month after demonstrations erupted over official corruption, overspending on the construction of stadiums and infrastructure for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics, police brutality, and a host other issues, a whiff of desperation hangs over her government. “We have a political leadership, in both Dilma and in the Congress, that, because it doesn’t have a clear understanding of what is happening, is answering with mere gestures,” said Cristovam Buarque, a senator and former education minister. “Whether it’s oil royalties or plebiscites, the agenda these days is nothing but marketing, marketing, marketing, pure marketing.” One of the main demands of the protesters, whose demonstrations have subsided but who remain a feared and potent political force, has been for a “World Cup level” of health care and education. In an effort to respond, Ms. Rousseff announced last week a new incentive-laden program that aims to send, beginning in September, thousands of doctors to urban slums and remote areas like the Amazon that lack adequate medical services. But it turns out that the government intends to look abroad, to countries like Portugal, Spain and perhaps Cuba, to fill many of those slots, a decision that immediately antagonized Brazilian doctors, who are underpaid and overworked in comparison with many of their peers in other countries. Brazilian medical associations have threatened to go to court to halt the initiative, describing it as an irresponsible media ploy, and they have also begun talking about a doctors’ strike. “I insist on starting by correcting one concept,” Ms. Rousseff said, clearly on the defensive, when she announced the effort on Monday. “The ‘More Doctors’ program does not have bringing doctors from abroad as its main objective, but instead bringing health services to the Brazilian interior.” Then, on Wednesday, Ms. Rousseff went to a conference in Brasília attended by many of the country’s 5,570 mayors where she announced that $1.3 billion would be made available to them for health care through a special government fund. But the mayors had been expecting a package twice that size, so they booed — and that reception, rather than her initiative, became the big story. “If she was only going to give them half of what they wanted, she should have gone on the radio to announce it and spared herself the embarrassment” of being slighted in such a public setting, said Bolívar Lamounier, a political analyst in São Paulo. “What we’re seeing now was obvious during the campaign: she’s got no game, she doesn’t know how to maneuver.” Ms. Rousseff does appear to be paying the price for her lack of political experience and skills. An economist by training, she had never held elected public office, serving only in state and federal cabinet posts before Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, her predecessor, chose her as the Workers Party standard-bearer in the 2010 election. Aided by his popularity, she won handily. At the peak of the protests last month, Ms. Rousseff made a point of turning to Mr. da Silva, a master of political maneuvering, for advice. But instead of having him fly to Brasília to confer with her, or talking quietly by telephone, she went to meet him on his home turf in São Paulo, leaving the impression among many Brazilians that she was not in charge and he was still pulling the strings. When they spoke again, he went to Brasília. But unhappiness within the Workers Party, including among members of Congress worried about their own survival in next year’s elections, has fueled speculation in the news media and discussion in the party about Mr. da Silva possibly returning as the party’s candidate if Ms. Rousseff’s downward spiral continued. “She’s a good head of government and a good administrator, but now she also has to assume the role of leader, and that’s the difficult part,” said Jorge Viana, a senator who is a member of the Workers Party and a supporter of the president. “That’s where we’ve felt the absence of Lula, because Lula is a great leader, with fantastic instincts and a sensitivity for dialogue.” Ms. Rousseff has had no better luck dealing with the clamor for a political housecleaning than she has had with social demands. In response to public disgust with a political system seen as corrupt and unresponsive — an opinion shared by 81 percent of respondents in a poll published late last month by Datafolha, a leading Brazilian research company — she has offered one ill-fated proposal after another. After her original idea of a constitutional assembly met with immediate resistance, for example, Ms. Rousseff embraced the idea of a plebiscite. But Congress voted down that proposal last week, in part because of concerns that it would be unconstitutional in the form her government was offering it. Now Ms. Rousseff and her staff are pushing for legislators to pass a hastily assembled political overhaul package, one version or another of which has been languishing in Congress since the mid-1990s. But the opposition, the news media and the public seem suspicious of the initiative, which is seen by some critics as an attempt by the Workers Party to create conditions that would allow it to remain in power permanently. “Everything is improvised, without adequate preparation, and not just the constitutional assembly idea, which was based on a foolish supposition,” said Fernando Limongi, a researcher at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning and a professor of political science at the University of São Paulo. “In a situation like this, the only thing you can do is try to take the initiative and define the agenda,” he said. “But what’s worrisome here is that there doesn’t seem to be an agenda, only ad-libbing.” The popular discontent, which is also directed at opposition parties and their leaders, clearly caught Ms. Rousseff and her advisers off-guard, as it did nearly everyone else. After a decade in which millions of Brazilians rose from poverty into the middle class, college enrollments doubled, employment and wages grew spectacularly, and social inequality diminished, they expected the beneficiaries of those changes to be grateful. “The government has been living in a certain isolation, a kind of comfort zone after 10 years, because everything seemed to be going so well,” Mr. Viana said. “We were flying on cruise control, ‘Everything is fine, Captain,’ and now we’ve run into this big turbulence.” |