OPINION

Hard Left Behind Brazil’s Protests

Not a mass movement behind big government.

Don’t believe the hype about Brazil’s protests, writes Mary Anastasia O’Grady in The Wall Street Journal: it’s not a movement against some big, corrupt government, but rather it’s popular discontent being abused by the hard left to target President Dilma Rousseff. The left-wing Workers’ Party governed Brazil for eight years under Lula de Silva, who assured investors that Brazil was a friend of markets—and global money managers gave their approval and foreign money flowed. But diehard socialists faced a crisis of conscious, writes O’Grady, since the country was thriving under these decidedly capitalist policies. Under Rousseff, the country has faced an economic slowdown—prime opportunity for the hard left to take advantage of the crisis.