The recent municipal elections in Brazil confirmed the trend: The left has been comprehensively defeated, with the Workers' Party (PT) reaping their worst results in 20 years.
As that sea change takes place, the government formed after the impeachment of PT's Dilma Rousseff is steamrollering through parliament a constitutional amendment that would put a 20-year cap on public spending that nobody has bothered discussing with society.
As PT's implosion appears set to put the left in disarray for a long time to come, one may wonder why the hurry. Yet, the reasons are not difficult to fathom and have little to do with the justifications the government invokes, namely the ongoing economic crisis. [...]
Almost 95 percent of those who voted in an online consultation opened by the Senate in September supported immediate direct elections - before, that is, the consultation mysteriously vanished from the Senate's homepage. [...]
In direct opposition to the logic that guided Brazil's post-dictatorship constitution, which established a compulsory minimum investment in health and education and tied it directly to raises in revenue as a way of correcting long-standing inequalities, this bill would entail that the next five governments would be constrained by a very low ceiling.
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