The ugly game

And now middle-class anger spreads to Brazil

A few years ago, everything seemed to be going Brazil's way. High commodity prices had buoyed the country's economy, now the world's seventh largest; and it was enjoying unprecedented political stability under a popular social-democratic dispensation. It had won bids to showcase its rapidly increasing prosperity to the world in the football World Cup of 2014 and the Olympics of 2016, cementing its emerging-power status. But growth has since collapsed to near zero, and news out of the country over the past week or so has further demonstrated how premature the Shining Brazil narrative was, as it is for India. Ten days ago, a protest on Twitter about local governments raising bus fares marginally, by 20 centavos, led to calls for protest on the streets. Those quickly snowballed into large demonstrations, of perhaps a million people, calling for less expenditure on shiny new stadiums for big sporting events and more on schools and hospitals. Brazil's police, caught wrong-footed - as have been most countries' police, except those in China - by such massive crowds, responded with a heavy-handed crackdown. On Thursday and Friday, the protests turned seriously violent, killing two people. Protestors set fire to the regional assembly in Rio de Janeiro and climbed on the roof of the parliament building in Brasilia. President Dilma Rousseff was forced to go on television to say she was willing to begin a dialogue with the disaffected, but would nevertheless "maintain order".

Like similar protests across the world, particularly in emerging-economy democracies like Turkey and India, there is a subtext to these protests: middle-class discontent with a government that seems out of reach. In India, the middle class, while speaking of corruption, was making a play for greater attention from a political class that has traditionally paid court to rural rather than urban areas. In Turkey, the protesters in the continuing Gezi Square demonstrations objected not just to the bulldozing of a public park, but to the government's remaking of cities all over Turkey, and to the growing Islamism in public life that upset secular city-dwellers. And in Brazil, many protestors come from an increasingly prosperous middle class that nevertheless feels that their taxes are too high, paying for stadiums and welfare schemes while not providing the quality of public services that many better-off urbanites expect. The rhetoric is familiar - the protests are being described as a "civil war against the corrupt politicians", and the centre-left government is a particular target of attack. The once-popular former president, Lula de Silva, is fighting allegations of permitting corruption, and vote-buying by the ruling party. The massive construction for the World Cup and Olympics is late, over budget, and has attracted numerous allegations of cronyism. Even football legends like Pele and Ronaldo, seen as defending the expense on the beautiful game, have become hate figures.

It is increasingly becoming obvious, as more and more countries give in to the culture of street protest, that something is amiss with the relationship between emergent middle classes everywhere and the states in which they live. Yet perhaps in each case the answers are different. In Brazil, in particular, the solutions seem difficult to find. As with the Occupy Wall Street protests of some years ago, the protestors seem to agree on very little specific reforms. In fact, some of the recent violence was sparked by right-vs-left factional aggression within the protestors' ranks. The real lessons from Brazil are perhaps two-fold. First, while pro-sports voices are usually loud, demanding more money to satisfy national pride, diverting the money from other tasks can frequently lead to an even louder backlash. And second, it is never safe to assume that a country having a few good years will continue to have them. Economic and governance reform must be a continual process, or dissatisfaction will spill over.