The 2016 coup and its aftereffects

Abstract

The impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in August 2016 was a coup d'état aimed at resuming the implementation of the neoliberal program from which the PT governments had distanced themselves. This rupture initiated a prolonged and still ongoing period of instability and crisis in Brazilian politics. For each situation of instability and crisis there are particular causal factors, but there is an underlying cause that characterizes this entire period: the mismatch between, on the one hand, the decline of the ideological hegemony of neoliberalism and, on the other, the political force that this program still maintains.