Brazil 2014: A mixture of politics in one single Cup

There was always going to be a lot riding on the 2014 World Cup. In 1950 Brazil had sought to confirm its burst of inter-war industrialisation and modernisation by hosting and winning the tournament. Their shock defeat to Uruguay was read as a national tragedy, symbolic confirmation of the limits of that process.

This time it was going to be different. In 2007 when the World Cup virtually fell into Brazil’s lap, the boom under the former President Lula was in full swing. Growth, exports and incomes were rising, Brazil was acquiring a new presence on the global diplomatic stage, oil had been discovered off the Atlantic coast. First the World Cup and then the Rio 2016 Olympic Games would set the seal on these unambiguous advances.

In one sense Brazil’s mega-event diplomacy has already worked, for it has brought the country an unprecedented degree of global scrutiny; but it has not been delivering quite the message intended by the political and sporting elites that hatched the plan. On the contrary, the preparations for the World Cup and Olympics have helped crystallise and dramatise many of the most important problems in contemporary Brazil; disastrous planning, poorly accountable elites, widespread conflicts of interest, corruption and embezzlement, a disregard for the rights and interests of the poor and middling.

Now on the eve of tournament there is more than just the narrative of Brazil’s arc of modernisation at stake. Not only the most expensive world cup hitherto, it is now the most politicised; the first that can expect widespread forms of protest and political action. Thus the character and meaning of the spectacle has become tied to Brazilian domestic and international politics, the ongoing political crisis at FIFA, and given the IOC’s interests in Brazil, the wider future of sporting mega-events.

Brazil’s presidential elections are to be held in October. Incumbent President Rousseff, running for a second term, has watched her poll ratings and Brazil’s economy drift down over the last year. Consequently she has been aggressively talking up the cup. The government has continued to argue that the World Cup will, despite everything, leave an important infrastructural legacy, and has made the case in an expensive television campaign. The state prosecutor of Goiás in Central Brazil is currently arguing that the broadcasts were so far from reality that they constituted false advertising and is seeking an injunction to take them off the air.

Rousseff’s opponents cannot, of course, openly hope that the World Cup is calamitous, but they are ready to profit from a disastrous tournament. Football star and former world champion Ronaldo, a member of the local organising committee and a supporter of opposition presidential candidate Aécio Neves, has been trying to shift responsibility for the course of events away for Brazil’s hapless football authorities to the federal government. Pelé, the biggest and most myopic cheerleader of the establishment, has been covering himself, finally acknowledging the terrible delays and administrative dysfunction.

The impact on the mega-events

Perhaps the greatest legacy of Brazil 2014 will be its impact on the international sporting bodies and their model of mega-events. The IOC, deeply perturbed by the pace of Olympic preparations, has installed itself in Rio and expects to intensify its presence between now and 2016. It can expect even greater levels of protest given the far greater urban and social impact of the games on Rio compared to any one world cup host city. The Olympics have, so far, been able to weather the lateness of Athens 2004, the levels of protest seen at Vancouver 2010 and at Sochi 2014 the negative impact of the host country’s grab of a neighbour’s territory and condoning homophobia, but Rio 2016 maybe a bridge too far.

FIFA, who will be holding their annual congress just days before the opening ceremony, arrives in Brazil with its already catastrophically low standing further eroded by the recent revelations concerning Qatar 2022’s World Cup bid and wide spread match fixing scandal in the lead-up to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Given that almost its entire income is dependent on the event, FIFA’s survival in its current form is riding on the World Cup being peaceable and functional enough that its commercial value is undiminished.

How much protest there will be is in the hands of the Brazilian public. The numbers approving of the whole World Cup project, just a majority in 2013, are now a minority. That said, a recent poll in Rio suggested only 11 per cent of the adult population was planning to demonstrate during the cup; though were this to actually happen the anti-world cup movement could count on attracting perhaps half a million people onto the streets. This seems unlikely, but if only 10 per cent of them – 50,000 – were to march on the Maracanã on a match day, their presence would be registered globally.

A perfect moment of pressure

Another indicator of the mood in Brazil has been the spate of strikes, protests and occupations that have broken out over the last month. Trade unions and their members know the final frantic weeks of preparations are the perfect opportunity to exert maximum pressure on the government; the Federal police have gone on strike across the country, the military police walked out in Salvador and Recife, bus drivers have held one day strikes in São Paulo and Rio, and teachers have demonstrated nationwide.

None of this is directly related to the World Cup but the consequences of these actions point to real problems ahead. The crust of civility and security in Brazil is paper thin in places: the police free north eastern cities saw their downtowns looted, homicides spike and the military called in to restore order. Rio and São Paulo are already close to gridlock. They were paralyzed by this disruption of their transport systems. Teachers in Teresópolis, alongside other groups, demonstrated at A Seleção’s (the national team’s) training camp, plastering their coach with anti-world cup stickers. An act unthinkable in Brazil until last year.

The Homeless Worker’s movement has been organising mass occupations of empty land near the new Arena Corinthian in Sao Paulo and protests close to the stadium, calling for more social housing and land reform. The Comité Popular, the main coordinating body of the anti-world cup and anti-Olympic protest declared a day of action in May that saw demonstrations in fifty cities.

In Brasilia, where Coca-Cola were hosting a display of the World Cup trophy at the national stadium, two thousand indigenous Brazilian protesters marched on the police lines just a kilometre or so away. The march was broken up using tear gas, the exhibition was closed down, and one protestor fired an arrow form his traditional bow into the leg of a police officer.

The Black Blocs, Brazil’s youthful anarchist provocateurs have made more appearances in the media than in the street, but they will no doubt appear during the World Cup. There are likely to be stones thrown, invasions of secured areas and efforts to provoke a police reaction, which hitherto has not proved difficult

Televised police brutality

In June 2013, what turned the initial protest into a conflagration was the televised brutality of the police. Demonstrations that had attracted just a few thousand in a few cities began to attract tens of thousands reaching out beyond the traditional core of activists to young, educated and previously apolitical Brazilians right across the nation. They may not all have been on the protest marches of the last year, but there are plenty of indications that resentment and anger is alive and well.

During the build up to past World Cups, many urban neighbourhoods rich and poor would by now be decked in green and yellow; they are not entirely absent but appear to be few and far between.

Brazil’s music industry would be expected to have produced a whole raft of world cup songs and anthems but the public appears to be shunning the official offerings and turning to protest tunes on YouTube like Edu Krieger’s Desculpe Neymar (Excuse me, Neymar) and MC Guimê’s País do Futebol (Country of Football). Brazil’s street artists have been saving their best for the occasion as dozens of anti-world cup pieces have gone up on the walls and trains of the country.

Hoping for wisdom of crowds

One possible scenario, outlined by the Economist, is that the tournament will run relatively smoothly, not without hassle and inconvenience, but without either major transport or crowd problems; there will be a small flurry of protest that the police will deal with it without too much incompetence or brutality and without too many foreigners getting inadvertently involved; the poor neighbourhoods called favelas will remain quiet as people focus on their TV sets; and Brazil play well and do well. The left, who vowed not to support the Seleção in 1970 under the junta, melted when the team started scoring. The same thing will happen again.

On the other hand as the events of the last month show there remain a considerable number of people ready to go on the street and one must assume, they have yet to really show their hand. The world’s TV cameras are arriving now, and it was the prospect of television coverage that multiplied attendance last June.

The idea that the police will manage the process without some kind of globally broadcast disaster seems quixotic. For all the talk of retraining to police democratic protest the emphasis has been elsewhere: passing more illiberal legislation to control protests, creating a massive surveillance capacity for the Brazilian security services, buying new helicopters, equipping all levels of the police with top of the range riot gear.

At the same time the police and the army are effectively occupying many favelas in Rio where the pacification programme of the last four years has either failed or not even begun. Here too, the hope that the tournament can pass without incidents of violence and protest is strained.

What happens on the pitch, not least to the Brazilian team itself, will be an important component of the meaning of these games, but the longer term political consequences are more likely to be made outside the stadium. It is hardly ideal that so much influence over the Brazilian presidency, and the fate of the sporting mega-events, should be in the hands of a very fragmented, protean alliance of social movements and a police force still operating effectively under martial law, but that is the pass that Brazil’s elite and their partners at FIFA and the IOC have brought us to.

In the end it will be the wider Brazilian public that determines the course of events. The authorities fear them, imagining them as a merely irrational mob. We must hope for the wisdom of crowds.