This protest got a lot of people with different opinions together. As ridiculous as it sounds, some of them even want the military back in power. Some people had swastikas drawn on their flags. Some others just want someone else on power.
All they have in common is their hate for the current president's party, who won the last election with roughly 52% of votes.
Also worth mentioning, the vice-president and the presiding officers of both legislative houses come from a party that's deeply involved in almost all corruption scandals in recent (post dictatorship) history.
This protest was organized by the Vem Pra Rua group (vemprarua.org.br) which is backed by Fundação Estudar, which, in turn, is backed by Jorge Paulo Lemann, one of, if not the, richest Brazilian citizen, and the Movimento Brazil Livre, which is backed by the Koch brothers.
I fail to see why any of this is relevant. The vice-president's party has been involved in corruption, so we should ignore the president and her party's own involvement in the biggest corruption scandals in the history of the country?
One of the organizers of the protests (definitely not the only one) is backed by a rich guy. So what? Does that make the claims of millions of Brazilians invalid? Are we all "the white elite"?
Think of you as someone on a boat in the middle of a nasty storm. The fire alarm is sounding, but you have no evidence there is actually a fire at the engine room or whether it's serious. Do you issue an abandon ship order and head right away to the lifeboats knowing they probably cannot withstand the storm or you try to assess the fire before doing so?
Also, mind you, the impeachment has no legal basis as it can only be based on misconduct that occurred during the current term. This doctrine has been tested and established right after the reelection amendment was introduced.
And, finally, this is the first time the fire alarm sounded, despite the fact we had numerous immense fires all over the place (we all know that, right?). Do we really want to shoot the person who turned the alarms on? For the first time we actually seem to have a fire alarm and teams actually assessing its extent and causes. By running to the lifeboats we'd turn our backs on all that, as the people who would run the country are the very people at the center of the fire.
The impeachment has legal basis on administrative improbity. This is what the law says:
"Acts of the President against the Constitution, and, especially, against the guard and legal use of public money".
The definition of "against the guard and legal use of public money" is given as, among other things,
"neglect the collection of rents, taxes and fees, as well as the conservation of national patrimony."
Futhermore:
"Are crimes of liability against the probity of administration: (...) Not make effective the responsibility of his subordinates, considered manifested in functional offenses or the practice of acts contrary to the Constitution."
and
"Constitutes an act of improper conduct which infringes upon the principles of government action or omission that violates the duties of honesty, impartiality, legality and loyalty to the institutions"
I'm not sure what you mean with your fire alarm allegory, but I suppose you're trying to say that all the investigations are only happening because the government (and the President in particular) let them happen. This is false. The Federal Police and the Public Attorney's Office are independent of the government and do not require it to allow any kind of investigation.
Edit: by the way, weather the impeachment is legal or not is irrelevant to the point of weather the protesters are representative of Brazil's population (they are). You seemed to imply that somehow due to who organized part of the protests, they are not, but then nothing in your latest reply addresses that.
The crime has to be committed during the present term. The right to impeach the president for crimes committed during the presidency ceases when the term ends (although this law predates the reelection amendment, it is understood a reelected president starts a new term). That's the end of it.
I agree this law has its issues, but this is what's written.
Again, I am not sure the protesters are that representative. It's much harder to generate a positive response from people who are between neutral and satisfied than it is to obtain the same response from people who are dissatisfied. While approval rates are as low as they ever were for Dilma, strong disapproval like this is not unprecedented. Add to that that the reasons for protesting were all over the spectrum: from stronger economic action in the trickle-down doctrine all the way to "we want our dictatorship back". More than 80% of the protesters declared themselves voters for the candidate who lost the election and most of the protesters were white upper urban middle-class professionals.
I live in São Paulo, and, as difficult as it may be to grasp that, I must understand what I see around me is not typical Brazil. I live in a bubble.
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.
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.
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.
Would not get anything near that if the election was today. Election was won basically by public spending + promising that no austerity measures would take place after the election. Brazil has lost a golden opportunity to improve itself between 2005-2012 just because the current party wanted to win one more election.
Fascism has a way of surfacing during difficult times. Greece has a big problem with Golden Dawn again. When crisis struck they started recruiting using food drives/soup kitchens for 'pure Greeks' for example.
The current party has been in the power for too long (Lula 2x 4 years, Dilma currently on her 2nd 4-year period). Petrobras, the largest company in the country is government-owned and run and lost 80% of it's value in the past 5 years due to corruption. The Brazilian Real devaluated 60% in 2 years. People have all the right to be pissed off. The biggest problem here is that the opposition is also very corrupt, so people are not protesting in favor of someone, but just against Roussef. Though situation.