The verdict is already in: Brazil’s 2014 World Cup, the “Copa das Copas,” or “Cup of Cups,” has been the most exciting tournament in recent memory. Before the first game of the quarterfinals, set to kick off today at noon in Rio de Janeiro between France and Germany, 154 goals have been scored already, surpassing the 145 during the entire 2010 World Cup and placing the 1998 tournament’s all-time record of 171 in serious jeopardy. For the host side, there has been much to cheer, with Neymar leading the Seleção, as the Brazil squad is known in its home country, to a string of stirring victories with a golden-fringed energy that has made the nation genuinely excited about soccer again after the difficult lead-up to the tournament. Neymar, Brazilian soccer’s pin-up du jour, may also in the process have helped stabilize the troubledgovernment of President Dilma Rousseff。
离开现场，事情令人惊讶地顺利进行，很少有任何运输问题，交通混乱，机场批发和大量的，窒息抗议许多人的期待。“这是真实的，许多人担心最糟糕的是，基于圣保罗政治咨询公司ProSpectiva的管理合伙人Ricardo Camargo Mendes junargy Mendes。“但巴西人对锦标赛的跑步方式感到愉快。”
The gloom that sat over the nation as the World Cup got underway appears to have lifted; the only real strikes of significance have been those of Neymar in front of the goal.
即使是抗议者,在很大程度上,stayed silent — something I have discovered for myself while traveling through Brazil. On three occasions, in three different cities, I tried to make contact through Facebook with the Black Bloc, the most militant wing of the protest movement that sprung up around the Confederations Cup football tournament in June last year. On each occasion I received a reply and arrangements were made to meet; on each occasion I arrived at the appointed place and nobody from the Black Bloc turned up. This is one protest movement that seems peculiarly reluctant to get its message to a broader audience.
然而，分析师仍然持怀疑态度，即世界杯将在10月份在全国选举前提升卢梭持续的提升。Markets have remained relatively neutral since the start of the tournament, with the Brazilian real strengthening modestly and the benchmark local Ibovespa equities index easing into a slight decline over the past three weeks after spiking in the days following the opening match on June 12. The government’s poll numbers reflect the slightly stagnant state of the markets. Rousseff’s approval rating rose to 35 percent in the July 2 poll conducted by political polling firm Datafolha, from 33 percent in June. But despite the moderate World Cup lift, that July figure is only a slight improvement on Rousseff’s all-time low of 30 percent, recorded at the height of the protests one year ago, and still comfortably below February’s recent high of 41 percent. According to Mendes, the successful execution of the World Cup may have helped stanch the decline in Rousseff’s poll numbers.
“We don’t expect her to fall much further from here,” he says. In that sense, the World Cup has been “a stabilizing event” for Rousseff. “If it had gone badly it would have been bad for her popularity but it’s gone well, so voters are less negative about her government,” he adds.
帝国为主席的挑战者似乎缩小了差距。在其候选人AécioNeve中，巴西的中央情区的社会民主党对10月选举中的一个人感到高兴。Neves是巴西的最受欢迎的前总督，巴西的第二大州和家乡是该国第三大都市区的世界杯主持人城市贝洛·····奥塔姆Datafolha以及大多数政治分析师，仍然拥有Rousseff越过这条线并赢得第二次，但对奈维的支持正在上升：7月2日民意调查在46％的46％的第二轮跑步下对Rousseff进行支持39％，反映了自6月初最后一项民意调查以来缩小的1个百分点。
Neves built his reputation as a fiscal hawk who saved from bankruptcy Minas Gerais, which he governed from 2002 to 2010, and turned it into the most business-friendly state in Brazil — giving him obvious appeal in a country fighting to tame a deepening fiscal deficit and rising inflation. “The gap is narrowing, but it’s hard to see it narrowing much further,” says Mendes of Neves’s uphill battle. The base of popular support for Rousseff’s Workers’ Party (PT), especially in rural and poor urban areas, is simply too sticky. Demographics and the polls still favor Rousseff — for now.
There’s also evidence of an increasing pragmatism in the way that Rousseff is handling the task of pre-election campaigning, especially in the increasing reliance on her fellow PT member, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who had been kept largely out of the picture for the first few years of her first term. Lula is helping forge consensus among the party on election policy, which may make the PT more appealing to swing voters who had been turned off by the ideological rigidity of Rousseff’s first term.
“我们将LULA视为务实所，”布拉德斯科资产管理的首席经济学家Fernando Holorato表示，SãoPaulo为基于SãoPaulo的公司，管理层的管理资产为1300亿美元。“There’s less of an emphasis on ideology” in the way the PT is handling the lead-in to the election, raising hopes that Rousseff, should she win in October, will not shy from the cuts that will be necessary to rein in the deficit and bring the nation’s finances back into balance.
Early rumors suggest that either Alexandre Tombini, the governor of the central bank, or Nelson Barbosa, a former deputy Finance minister who left Rousseff’s government midway through her first term, is in line to replace Guido Mantega as Finance minister in the event of a PT victory. Both are relative moderates and rumors of their involvement in the PT’s plans could help influence the narrative that Rousseff, having taken a deeply interventionist turn in her first term, is in the throes of a belated embrace of economic pragmatism and will be more willing to press ahead with structural adjustment.
But if inflation continues to rise and unemployment — another looming problem — does too, the next few months could swing the polls decisively in favor of the opposition, argues Mendes. In the meantime, the carnival of football will roll on modestly but not decisively, supportive of the government’s fortunes in the bigger political match to come.
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