The Americas | Brazil’s liberals

Niche no longer

Thatcherism is winning adherents

|SÃO PAULO

AMONG the buskers on Avenida Paulista, São Paulo’s main thoroughfare, one act stood out on a recent Friday afternoon. A live rock band played spiffy renditions of “Blue Suede Shoes” and other 1950s classics; between numbers, six panellists sang the praises of competition and fielded questions from 100-odd onlookers about such issues as transport prices. The event was organised by the Free Brazil Movement (MBL), a group founded last year to promote free-market answers to the country’s problems. The al fresco concert-cum-colloquium was a riposte to demonstrators who took to the streets a half-dozen times in January to demand free bus transport. A better idea would be to open bus services to competition among private firms, which would improve quality and lower costs, the MBL-ers claimed.

Although Brazil thinks of itself as a “tropical Sweden”, advocates of freer markets and a less intrusive state are making headway. Of the 50 organisations that belong to the Liberty Network, an umbrella group, all but a handful were founded in the past three years. A “liberty forum” in April is expected to draw some 5,000 South American freedom-lovers to Porto Alegre, a southern city. This year’s theme, inspired by the Charlie Hebdo murders, is freedom of expression.

Soon such folk will have a new political party to represent them. Called simply Novo (“new”), the party stands unabashedly for free markets, a minimal state, low taxes and individual liberties. This would extend Brazil’s narrow political spectrum. The Workers’ Party of the president, Dilma Rousseff, is decidedly left-wing. The main opposition party, the Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB), is friendlier to markets but, as its name suggests, it is by no means Thatcherite.

Novo sounds like it will be. Its president, a banker called João Amoêdo, calls for privatisation of state-controlled enterprises such as Petrobras, an oil giant in the midst of a corruption scandal. The fledgling party has submitted the 492,000 notarised signatures needed to register with the electoral authority. Mr Amoêdo hopes for approval in March; it plans to field candidates in next year’s local elections. A new liberal force could provide fresh answers to the country’s increasingly difficult economic plight (see article).

Novo’s brassy brand of liberalism is still a minority taste. Many Brazilians associate the liberal reforms enacted when the PSDB was in power in the 1990s with the short-term pain they caused rather than the long-term stability they secured. At the University of São Paulo, the loftiest of Brazil’s ivory towers, microeconomics courses dwell on market imperfections while neglecting government failures, laments Fabio Barbieri, who teaches the subject.

Waxing and waning: Brazil's economic woes, in charts

The social-science section of Livraria Cultura, a famous bookshop on Avenida Paulista, displays freshly printed copies of Karl Marx’s “Capital” but carries nothing by John Stuart Mill, his great liberal contemporary. After the military coup of 1964 “we were all deformed by revolutionary Marxism”, says Eduardo Giannetti, a liberal economist (his 29-year-old son was among the Paulista panellists). For decades a cartelised capitalism, protected by the state, kept products shoddy and prices high, which did not help the private sector win friends.

But opinion may be shifting. Brazilians have long been open-minded about gay rights and immigration (but not legalisation of drugs). A poll by Datafolha, a research firm, published in September found that 30% are sceptical about state intervention and tax-and-spend policies, up from 26% a year earlier. In October’s presidential election Ms Rousseff defeated her challenger, the pro-business candidate of the PSDB, only narrowly. These are hopeful signs for liberals. But it will be some time before “let’s introduce competition into public transport” drums up the same enthusiasm as “free tickets”.

This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline "Niche no longer"

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