Brazil is one of the world’s emerging powers, a nation of nearly 200 million people that is blessed with vast mineral wealth and abundant natural resources. It has oil, the Amazon rainforest, more renewable water than any other country and a quarter of the world’s arable land. It has become one of the world’s great bread – baskets. And it is excelling at soft power: Brazil will host both the 2014 Fifa World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.
Yet all is not well in this land of searing inequalities. It is not just the multitudes in the favelas who are restive but the educated middle classes. In recent days, to coincide with Brazil hosting the Fifa Confederations Cup, a warm-up for the World Cup, more than one million people have taken to the streets to protest. Their ostensible motivation was a rise in bus fares but their grievances range from political corruption to resentment at a decadent elite.
In a country that loves football, not even the great Pelé was able to appease the protesters. His appeals for calm were received with derision.
President Dilma Rousseff has shown little leadership so far in the crisis. She has hastily promised to hold a referendum on reform – but to decide what, exactly? And, as Isabel Hilton writes on page 22, the protests seem “like just the beginning” of something long-lasting. Could it be that the people do not want the World Cup in Brazil, after all? Or, at least, not on these terms?