This period is marked by mostly difficult, negative news, with one good news at the very end of this period of six months, the announcement of the agreement between the european union, 20 years in the making. Whether the agreement will be implemented remains, obviously, a question mark that we will detail in negotiations. Different elements of the agreement. It is a complicated manner, but it is important that the agreement has been confirmed. Also, quite important is the lift of the veto the United States had on negotiations between brazil and the oecd geared toward brazil. This is a very important information, very important development, was an accomplishment of president bolsonaros visit here in washington in april. Again, remains to be seen how the negotiations between brazil and the member countries will develop. We know that this was accomplished thanks to the white house over the objections of ustr and commerce department. So we start in a scenario where it is uncertain. Uncertainty is has been the mark of the First Six Months. But it is not clear whether the president will be able to implement this ambitious and controversial agenda. We are live on webcast, we are live on cspan for this discussion, and i wanted to welcome our colleagues from cspan in the audience following this proceeding. As you know, pension reform, which is key to restoring confidence in brazil, has moved forward in tbilisi on congress in the Brazilian Congress due to the efforts of the speaker of the house, and the successful u. S. Visit which i mentioned before. Foreign policy remains a question mark in brazil. We have controversial measures, some of them already reversed at the vote in congress and Supreme Court. Those geared towards education, gender, environment, indigenous rights, etc. As you know, the most popular minister of the government has been under a lot of pressure following improper exchanges, or what was presented as improper exchanges between prosecutors. And also in the news, tensions between the president s inner circle and his military advisers, which remains unresolved. Most important, the two principal information of this pe riod are unfortunately negative. Period are unfortunately negative. The economy is not doing well. Predictions of Economic Growth at the beginning of the period have been revised towards the negative side. And the president s popularity has also dropped. Depending on who is making the calculation, it has dropped precipitously in the last six months. Well, to discuss all that, we have with us a Wonderful Group of people, dear friends all. Mauricio mora, ceo and founder of ideaiia the data. Andrea murta, director of north america jota. It is a very successful, awardwinning publication in brazil. Monica de bolle, director of the Latin American Program at the school of advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins university. Also at the Peterson Institute of international economics. And last but not least, the thiago de aragao, partner and director of intelligence for the center for strategic and International Studies, csis. They will speak in the order you see here, and i will invite mauricio to go first. He has a powerpoint. Good morning. Thanks for offering the invitation. I have some numbers, but im going to start saying that the First Six Months of bolsonaro, we have a lot of results. I think you americans can relate to that because i started watching the daily tweeter from the presidency, and not just from the president himself also from his son. You should be glad to have donald, jr. , in the first family. We have a lot of tweets. We have a minister innovation from the government. I will bring some numbers in here. And you have the famous speech from bolsonaro about the golden shower. I cannot go into details about that. [laughter] but the first number that bolsonaro, he lost popularity during the First Six Months. His positive evaluation when we ask people to evaluate the federal government in the beginning, people seem to very good about the government. They started in a highly expectation mood. But he was losing popularity, especially in march and april. Now we know that he lost popularity on the voters that voted for him in the second round, people that basically choose him because of the protection he had for the work party, not because of his proposals, those voters now, knowing what he is presenting, basically saying we do not vote for that. They are mostly concentrated in the north and northeast of brazil. They are mostly middleincome voters. The region of result of the president has the best evaluation is the south of brazil. But he lost popularity and this was very fast. 15 Percentage Points in three months. The numbers are showing that we have clear polarization in brazil and people who think the government is very, very good and very bad. This is different compared to the early parts of the government for lula and dilma. He is polling lower than those president s of the moment. The expectation is worse when people are asked how brazil is going to be a year from now. He is losing in a monthly basis. The economy is suffering not going to talk about the economy now, but the expectation of the improvement of the economy has changed in a negative way. This is something that i want to make the point that no brazilian president remains popular without Economic Growth. There is no popular presence president with low Economic Growth in brazil, and i think everywhere. This is a key point, how is going to manage popularity without Economic Growth. However, and this is the good news i think i have never seen this level of support for pension reform in brazil from the Public Opinion. Im not asking if people are against or in favor of the public funds, because it is very hard for the regular citizens to actually say what kind of pension reform is going to be voted in the congress. People are expecting that the pension reform will be approved and be approved this year. I feel that the congress itself has already realized this. My scenario is that they are going to approve pension reform this year. It is hard as figure late which pension reform will go through it is hard to speculate which pension reform will go through, but there is a sense in congress that there is Popular Support. People are already pricing to have pension reform approved. This is new in brazil. I think it is good news, because again, im not going to go into the economics, but this is different from what we had before. Expectation of pension reform approved is very high. This is, i think, the best news ive seen on the first matter of government. Did not have that in dilma, did not have that in the lula. But when you ask people if engine reform will make my life better for the economy is going to be better in the next three years because of pension reform, the expectations are very low. On one side it is good because people dont expect pension reform to be the silver bullet. But on the other hand, they dont see how the pension reform will get back jobs, get back income. In brazil i dont know the exact number but right now we have 30 Million People unemployed and another 50 Million People in the Informal Sector as well. This is a critical part of the government bolsonaro moving forward, because usually in terms of popularity the government do have one year because they can blame the former government, but starting from january 2020 it will be very hard to blame other governments for him. I think the economy moving forward is a key component, and first, the bolsonaro style of communicating to the Public Opinion is very similar to the trump style. You never know what is going to happen the next tweet. Going to give the example that paulo was talking about. The tweets in december and january, the worst agreement that brazil [indiscernible] according to the president ial tweet. Since saturday, it is the best thing that happened. You never know very similar to trump. He talks a lot to his base. Basically communicates to people that like him, that support him. Theres not too much to moderate the communication. That is also trumps style. Trump as it was to the economy moving in the u. S. Trump has at least economy moving in the u. S. In brazil the economy is not moving. The question moving forward, if that is kind of aggressive way to communicate to your own base, we remain with this low Economic Growth . This is the question i have moving forward. This is a key point for his popularity. The last point i want to make relates to the book we just published and it is available online. Hard copies on the left. When you listen to him it is basically dividing the country. The people that support the operation and people against oldschool politicians, people who are different from everything brasilia has to offer, from the oldschool politicians, the establishment, everything that goes against the work party, transporting the narrative in the campaign to the government. Just to conclude here, if you have good economic management, people are employed, but that is not the case in brazil. Key challenge on the economic side, especially focused on Public Opinion. Thank you, mauricio. Andrea, it looks like politics in brazil is doing what politics does in most democracies. It is proposals from the executive and what i hear, including from monica i hope to go deeper on that, is that the proposal on social security, a key element of the legislative agenda now, is much better now, and the regional presented to congress, president. So is politics functioning in brazil . Is this a way to look into . Thats a great question and has been a defining one for the six months of the bolsonaro government. When he ran for elections he made two bets. He bet he could win an election without the usual proposals that you do did in the past without the party behind him, tv time, etc. That bet he has won obviously. The second is that he could change the way politics is done in brazil and the relationship between the executive and the powers in brazil could be revamped in a new way. So far at least that has not paid off. His relationship with other powers has been controversial, and if i would summarize what is happening in brazil in one sentence, the economic proposals are moving forward in spite of the government and not because of the government. I will show you some numbers to support that. Just so you understand what we do, we have an online digital news publication and we work with corporations and businesses on Premium Products that use our journalistic newsgathering with the data pulling and analyzing to show trends in government and in agencies throughout the three branches of power in brazil. To explain a little bit how these relationships are going on, let me start with the easiest one to which is that bolsonaro and the Supreme Court. We are coming from a time when we saw the Supreme Court have a very strong activity coming from the elections, the decisions that set of the stage to have the outcomes that we did. They were very powerful. It was on the discussion of the Kitchen Table of every brazilian for about a year. Now that bolsonaro is in power and we have the chief justice presiding of the Supreme Court, we have seen more of a supporting actor role for the Supreme Court. They are not trying to impose anything to the government. They are taking a more active role. It will not act if something is clearly constitutional that require the institutional response. But they are not in the mood or in the role of creating issues for the government. They want to facilitate governing not to be on the side of government by facilitating the relationships in brazil that would help the governing process move forward. Someone who deals with politics without too much for your of interfering, meetings with politicians and Party Leaders throughout the spectrum. That is the tone he wants to give the Supreme Court right now in brazil. Congress is a bit different. What we are seeing in congress is the opposite, taking a much stronger role in the maneuvering of brazilian politics right now. The relationship between congress and the bolsonaro government is quite difficult. This bet that he made of trying to set of a new tone for the relationship has created the deep divide between the leadership of congress and the executive. As i not helped by tweet that those are not helped by tweets from the government and the first graph shows the assessment of deputies in the house of representatives and their relationship to the bolsonaro government. Wasaverage at this point 3. 94, which was a very low average, and it was similar to what we saw with Dilma Rousseff before the impeachment. It is about 4. 8 on both sides. There was a bit of a Recovery Movement with that relationship. Bolsonaro going back and allowing certain oldstyle politics to take place. Allowing people to nominate the ir own people for positions in state governments, for example, or at least promising to do so. That has provoked improvement. It is still a difficult relationship. This is the assessment of the bolsonaro government govern ability, which is the ability to approve laws. It is still not high, 4. 4. Not much above 5 right now. You might ask them, how is it possible that Economic Reforms are going to happen . A lot of subscribers in the u. S. That asked me how pension reform is going to pass if you have this type of relationship. What happens is that bolsonaro has the luck, lets say, of having a shared agenda with the leaders of congress. The speaker of the house is not moving forward with pension reform to help bolsonaro. He is doing that because he believes it will help himself. His own political agenda, and there is shared understanding in congress that this has to happen. We see on a somewhat conservative number, 84 chance of reform being approved asat the moment. There is not an organized movement to be opposed. There are pockets of resistance, but not in an organized way that would ep this from going impede this from going for. Together with asking congressmen their opinions and getting the responses, we do our own assessment based on how they behave on social media, our own newsgathering and conversations and the record with congressmen at the parliament in brasilia and also the historic data of their voting. We put all of that together to measure chances of app roval or to see how each congressman is going to vote Going Forward. When congressmen vote together with the government following the advice of the leadership of government, we call that high governability . Executives will vote with the way the leadership of government is telling them to vote. It has never been quite easy in brazil. It goes up and down a lot. You have specific drops in dramatic moments of brazilian history, including before the impeachment, when the tapes were released, we see very sharp drops. The beginning of the bolsonaro government, you see at the very end of the line a very sharp drop when the relationship with congressmen was very bad and congress was sending messages to government and approving bills and all the things that the government felt would be damaging to the budget operation to send that message. What it went right up but it went right up again. Shared agenda. And they will not make you vote on something that they dont think is going to be approved anyways. It will take out of the agenda of the voting in congress measures that they dont think will be approved. That helps the index go up. Bolsonaro is not at the height of what lula had. What he had at the best moments of the presidency, he has not reached that point, but it is not so low as to prevent approval of measures can be there. This shows the frequency of votes together with what the government wants. We did see that drop right at the beginning that was strong with the messages being sent. It went up again. It is on the level that can still pass. We think there is an 85 govern ability index. We calculate there are about 250 executives that vote or often than not together with government, which is a high number, and enough to pass even constitutional amendments in brazil. The new representatives we had a very big turnaround of new people coming in to congress in the last election, newly elected ones more likely to vote with government than the other. Here we see how we divide parties in Congress Based on whether or not they are more on the governments side or less. The blue ones are more likely to vote together with government. In terms of number of parties, it is way higher than people who are neutral and people opposed to government, period. The opposition you can basically count as the workers parties, and those are the most antagonistic, but he doesnt go much beyond that. People who are against the bolsonaro government in every stance that they have. This is just the position of parties by those numbers. So the Workers Party is definitely against the government, but not many else. Just to finish with pension reform, this is the historic lines of support for plans of the government. We have seen a steady increase of support. We are seeing it go up again. Right now the blue line is higher than when we had no proposal on the table. It was very high before it was presented. Once the negotiations move forward, occurring to take out are going to take out of the proposal points of it . It went up again. I will end say that these measurements are focused mostly on economic points, the economic agenda. These measurements are focused on the economic agenda. If you were to measure the support for the agenda of the bulls our government, it is bolsonaro government, it is very dif