Poll: Brazilians growing oddly dissatisfied with their leftist government, slowing economy

As I mentioned the other day, Brazilians have been growing increasingly dissatisfied over the past couple of years as they’ve started to wonder how it is that their government is managing to spend billions upon billions on (straggling and still incomplete) infrastructure, transportation, renovation, and stadium projects, but so many of their fellow citizens are trapped in poverty without access to adequate hospitals or schools. Like so many governments that bid to host major international sporting events, the regime of their leftist, Cuba-supporting President Dilma Rousseff has promised that the juice required to host the World Cup starting next week and the Olympics in 2016 will eventually be worth the squeeze because of all of the job creation and tourism it will bring about, but the economic payoff from these sorts of events reliably falls vastly short of both the promises and “investments” the host country made on its behalf (particularly countries with markedly socialist tendencies and insanely corrupt bureaucracies).

The national frustration has recently been bubbling over in the form of both public demonstrations and political sentiments, according to Pew:



Inflation, Crime, Health Care and Corruption Top Concerns

What’s more, a full 61 percent of those soccer-lovin’ Brazilians think that hosting the World Cup has been bad for their country because it has taken money away from public services, while 52 percent think that President Rousseff is having a negative influence on Brazil (and for a comparison, 84 percent felt that her predecessor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was having a positive influence in the final year of his presidency in 2010). Rousseff is up for reelection later this year, and it looks like the World Cup she surely hoped would boost her campaign prospects is instead turning into quite the albatross.