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Comment by martinrame | Hacker News Reader

BTW, Brazil has a population of 200million, and this protest's had at most 1 million people. This isn't as representative of people's toughts as right hand media tries to show.

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This is the only comment that rings true to me. I lived in Brazil for 7 years, and yes, people were unhappy with Lula before they were unhappy about Dilma Roussef. But overall, poor people (which is a substantial part of the population) were happy with their governments.

On the other hand, most people I knew voted for Lula and Dilma because they actually benefitted from their policies. When Lula left power his approval rate was something over 80%, which was better than any other president before him. And yet, if you asked the right people, you'd the country was about to explode because people were so unhappy.

People are not happy here. The current president has taken unorthodox economic measures whose results we are now seeing. Electricity is up around 60% since last december due to the failure of the president's populist policies of controlling prices. Same for fuel, because Petrobras wasn't allowed to raise its prices, kept artificially low by the government in an attempt to control inflation.

The president was reelected on a campaign of lies, and is now doing what she accused and claimed her opponents would do, in one of the greatest cases of electoral embezzlement ever seen.

No, people are not happy with this government, and no, it's not only the rich.

I think that is a silly argument. In that case, any march or protest of the elected majority is not representative of people's thoughts, because the protest will contain fewer people than then number of people who voted in the majority. The fact that you can get 1 million people to stop what they are doing and protest shows that there is a solid group of people discontent with something. I couldn't find any exact numbers, but I'd imagine that the occupy movement was about the same size. That movement was certainly not unimportant, despite the small size of that compared to the US population.

Living in Rio as an expat and hearing in the evening people banging wooden spoons in the cooking pans on their balconies I can tell you - majority of people seem to be pissed off, I've never seen something like that.

If you live in the South and Southeast, you probably have seen some declining living standards for middle-class families. That is mostly offset by substantial improvements in the rest of the country.

Still, it's funny to call this the "Protest of the 0.5%"

I lived in the South (Santa Catarina) from 2003~2011. I don't know what the situation has been since, but while I lived there the living standard of people in the Southern states went up by a lot. Working class families suddenly had access to buying cars, flying both internally and abroad, and a bunch of other changes. Most of them were driven by the incredible industrial growth at the time, but the supposedly incompetent government of Lula did a great job of keeping the country's economy under control while countries like Argentina (where I grew up) went through the typical boom/bust cycle of fast-growing economies.

So yeah, this sounds to me like the grumblings of the typical political discontents who would credit Fernando Henrique Cardoso and the PSDB for anything good that happened in the country, even after 8 years of PT presidency.

The thing is, the major structural changes that brought more wealth and better living conditions to the poor really were made by Fernando Henrique Cardoso (I don't vote for PSDB, btw). What Lula did was mostly broaden the welfare spending. Oh, and the other thing were these one or two huge corruption that made the previous government's corruption pale in comparison.

In a poll mentioned today in the news, people of lower income were interviewed. None of the interviewees were present in the protests; however, all said they felt represented by them.

So there's what the "left hand" media says (generously sponsored by government money) and what the people say, and it's not the same thing.

There were more than 2 million people in the streets country-wise, not to mention the nd pan-banging protests in apartment windows every time a government representative appears on TV.

John Oliver has put it very well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51W2N68zckY

1 million people in one city (Sao Paulo). Most capitals (including Brasilia) had protests as well.

It was calculated to around half a million counting all cities. The "1 million people in Sao Paulo" was an estimate that was soon proved false.

Official numbers (calculated by the police) say more than 2 million country-wide. I don't see anyone claiming "1 million people in São Paulo" to be false, except government-sponsored media.

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