Dilma is still ahead in election poll

Even with all the protests, president Dilma would be elected in the first round of the presidential elections this year, according to the latest survey from Datafolha published this sunday. Dilma ranks first with 43% to 47% of the votes in different scenarios with different competitors, making more than the sum of all the other candidates for president. The result points to a stable perspective from the last evaluation of Dilma electoral performance and according to Folha analysis means that it is Dilma that should run as a candidate for PT (the Worker's Party) and not former president Lula. This was received as good news to the government because it shows that president Dilma's popularity recovered from the past results on october lat year when her vote intention was in 42%.

Dilma will face the challenge of keeping the economy
growing while avoiding inflation

In spite of the good numbers, Dilma still has some challenges ahead. Her negative evaluation went up from the previous survey, showing that her current popularity might fall in the future. The risks with the economy downturn (with the current strategy from the Central Bank to reduce the economic growth in order to control inflation) and the possible negative impacts of protests in the World Cup may force a second round of the elections in the end of October.

Former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, from the social democrat party (PSDB), the biggest rival of PT, bets against Dilma in an interview published this weekend in El País Brasil, given to my former  boss Carla Jimenez and to Luis Prados. Cardoso makes an interesting diagnosis of the current state of affairs in Brazil: PT has lost the momentum to carry on the reforms when the country faced a window of opportunity -- as a matter of fact, the government never saw it as a window of opportunity but rather as a permanent state that, as we all know, already passed. He says, though, that if it was not the case that the country was as good as international investors thought it was in the past, it is not as bad as they think now. He claims we need a better positioning in Latin American politics (which now has an all new economic bloc: the Pacific Alliance) and expects the current dissatisfaction now common in the middle class and businessmen will be also passed on to the greater part of the population as the campaign goes on.

Protests
Enough with politics. Now back to the protests. This weekend a new set of protests against the World Cup and now the new wave of hikes in the bus tariff (that should happen in all major capitals by the end of the year) has again ended in violence. This time the controversial attitudes came out of São Paulo police and its new "ninja force"(policemen that know their ways in martial arts, and carry no guns) when they started to arrest and remove protesters based only in suspicions -- this was criticized by some lawyers because it would go against Brazilian Constitution that only allows police to act based on facts. Five journalists were taken down by these same policemen, carried out of the protests and later let go when the Police chief found out they were working to cover the protests. Among them was my former O Globo colleague and friend, Sergio Roxo. Interesting enough, as Roxo wrote in O Globo, the the protest in São Paulo ended with 6 injured people, among them 4 cops, one of which broke his arm while trying to immobilize a protester.