Good morning. Welcome to the Wilson Center. Im the director of the Brazil Center here at the center. It is a pleasure to have you he here. This period is marked by i would say mostly difficult negative news with one good news at the very end of this period of six months which is 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. There will be detailed negotiations now at the different elements of the agreement. Its a complicated matter, but its important that the agreement has been confirmed. Also quite important is the lift of veto the United States had on negotiations between brazil and the oecg geared towards brazi s brazils. This is a 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 countries of oecg will develop. We know this was accomplished thanks to the white house over the objections of the usgr and congress department. So we start in a scenario where uncertain uncertainty. Were live on web cast, we are live on cspan for this discussion and i wanted to welcome our colleagues from cspan and the audience following this proceeding. As we know, pension reform which is key to restoring confidence of investors in brazil is this forward in the speaker of the house aside from the successful visit that i mentioned before. Foreign policy remains a question mark in brazil. We have controversial at both in congress and Supreme Court. Those geared towards education, gender, environment, indigenous rights, et cetera. As the most popular minister of the government has been under a lot of pressure following revelations of improper exchanges or what was presented as improper exchanges between prosecutors of the cases and also in the new extensions between the president s inner circle and his military advisors which remains unresolved. Most importantly, the two principle information of this period are unfortunately negative. The economy is not doing well. The predictions of Economic Growth at the beginning of the period have been revised towards the negative side, and the president s popularity has also drop dropped depending on who is making the calculation, it has dropped precipitously in this First Six Months. Well, two discuss a to discus that, we have with us a Wonderful Group of people, founder and coo of big data, the director of north america for jata business. Director of Latin American Program at the school of advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University and the peterson university of international economics. Last but not least, partner and director of intelligence and senior associate at the center for strategic International Studies. They will speak in the order you see here in this. I invite mauricio to go first. He has a powerpoint. Good morning. I have numbers but im going to start saying that the First Six Months of bolsonaro we have a lot of fun in brazil. I think you americans can relate to that because i start watching the daily tweeter from the presidency and not only from the president himself but also from his sons. My first thing that you guys should be proud to have ivanka and donald junior as first families. So we had a lot of tweets. Im going to bring some numbers here. You also have a famous between from bolsonaro during carnival about the golden shower. I cannot go into details about that. Thank you. But the first number that we have that bolsonaro, he lost popularity during the First Six Months. His positive evaluation when we ask people, the people seemed very good about the government. They started in a highly expectation but he was lose not because of his proposals and actually those voters now knowing what hes presenting, they are basically saying i didnt vote for that. And they are mostly concentrated in the northeast of brazil. They are mostly middle income voters. Still, the region of brazil that the president has the best evaluations is the south of brazil, but the first message he lost popularity. This is very fast because in average he lost 15 Percentage Points in three months. And also the numbers are showing that we have a clear polarization in brazil, people that evaluate the government very good and people very bad. This is different compared to the initial parts of the government. Actually hes polling lower than all those president s at this moment. The Economic Expectations are worse when asked how the people feel how brazils going to be one year from now. It start in a much better mood and he losing in a monthly basis. The economy is suffering. Were not going to talk about the economy now, but the expectation about the improvement of the economy has changed in a negative way. So this is something that i want to make the point that no brazilian president remains popular without the Economic Growth. There is no popular president with low Economic Growth in brazil and i think everywhere. So this is a key point that how hes going to manage the popularity without Economic Growth. However, and this is the good news, i think ive never seen this level of support in brazil from the Public Opinion. Im not asking if people are against or in favor of, because its very hard for the regular season to say what kind of pension reform is going to be voted in the congress. The fact is that people are expecting that the pension reform will be approved and will be approved this year. The good news that i feel that the congress itself have already realized that. So my scenario is that theyre going to prove pension reform this year. Its very hard to speculate exactly which pension reform will go through, but there is a sense in the congress that we have the Popular Support for having at least in the market. This is new in brazil. And i think its good news because again were not going to go in the economic parts, but this is different than what we had before. And expectation of a pension reform approved is very high. And this i think is the best news that i see on the first semester of the government. Bols n when you ask people will the pension reform make my life better or if the economy is going to be better over the next three years because of the pension reform, the expectations are very low. In one side its good because people dont expect pension reform to be the silver bullet. But on the other hand they dont see how the pension reform would get back jobs. So in brazil i dont know the exact number, but right now we have around 14 Million People unemployed and another 15 Million People that are in the Informal Sector as well. So this is a critical part of the government bolsonaro moving forward. Because usually in terms of popularity, the governments do have one year as credit because it can blame the former government. Starting from january 2020 its going to be very hard to blame other government for him. So i think the economy moving forward is a key component. The bolsonaro style of communicating Public Opinion are very similar to the trump style. You never know whats going to happen the next tweet. Im going to give the example. If you get the tweets in december and january, it was the worst agreement that brazil could be into according to the tweets, the president ial tweets. And since saturday it is the best thing that happened. So you never know whats going to go to the next week. This is very similar to trump. He talks a lot to his base. He basically communicated with people that like him, that support him. There is not too much effort and energy to go to moderate the communication. Thats also the like trump style. But trump has at least the economy is moving in the u. S. In brazil, the economy is not moving. So the key question moving forward is if that kind of aggressive way to communicate to your own base will remain with this low Economic Growth. This is a question that i have moving forward and this is a key point for his popularity. And the last point that i want to make its Available Online at amazon in the book version. Bolsonaro brought the compare narrative to the government. So when you listen to him, hes basically dividing the country. The people that support the operation, people that are against the old school politicians, people that are different from everything that brazil has to offer, from the old school politicians from brazil, from the establishment, every time he feels pressured he goes against the work party. Hes basically transporting the narrative that was successful in the campaign to the government. Again, just to conclude here, that works if you have good economic management, if people are employed, but its not the case in brazil. So they have a key challenge on the economic side, especially focused on the Public Opinion. Thank you. Andrea, it looks like politics in brazil as criticized as it has been is doing what politics does in most democracies. It is processing proposals from the executive. And what i hear including from monica this that the proposal o social security, the key element of the legislative agenda now is much better now than the original presented to congress. So the politics functioning in brazil . Is this a way to look into . Thats a great question and has been a defining one of the First Six Months of the bolsonaro government. When he ran for elections he made two bets in brazil. He bet that he could win an election without the usual proposals that you did in the past in brazil, without a strong party behind him, without tv time, et cetera. In that bet, he has won obviously. The second bet was that he could change the way politics is done in brazil and the relationship between the executive and other powers in brazil could be revamped in a new way. So far at least, that has not paid off. His relationship with other powers is being a bit controversial. If i would summarize whats happening in brazil in one sentence is that the economic proposals are actually moving forward in spite of the government and not because of the government. Im going to show you some numbers to support that. Just so you understand what we do, we have an online digital news publication and we also work with corporations and businesses with some Premium Products with news gathering together with data polling 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 which is bolsonaro and the Supreme Court. We are coming at a time when we see the court have a very strong activity coming from the elections. It was basically their elections that set up the stage to have the outcomes that we did. They were very active. They were very powerful. It was on the discussion on the Kitchen Table of every brazilian for about a year we saw recently. Now that bolsonaro is in power and we have the chief justice presiding the Supreme Court, we are seeing more of a supporting actor role for the Supreme Court. So they are not trying to impose anything to the government. They are taking a more reactive role. They are not in the business of creating problems for the government. They will act if something is clearly unconstitutional or if there are attacks against the Supreme Court that require an institutional response. But theyre not in the role of creating issues for the government. They want to facilitate governing not to be on the side of the government but facilitating relationships in brazil that would help the government move forward. He has meetings throughout the spectrum and thats the kind of tone he wants to give the Supreme Court right now in brazil. Congress is a bit different. What were seeing in congress is kind of the opposite is taking a much stronger role, protagonist right now. The relationship is quite difficult. This bet that he made of trying to set up a new tone for the relationship has created a deep divide between the leaderships of congress and the executive. And those are not helped by tweets or comments that come from government, come from the president s sons criticizing the old way of doing politics in brazil. And we have some measurements to show that. So we do polling inside the congress to see how the congressmen themselves are viewing the relationship with the executive. So this first graph here shows the assessment of deputies in the house of representatives of the relationship to the bolsonaro government. These are the congressmen giving grades to how they view the relationship. The average at this point in may was 3. 94, which was a very low average. It was similar to what we saw right before the impeachment. He has recovered a little bit. So nowadays hes about 4. 8. So there was a bit of recover movement with that relationship based on a number of things including bolsonaro going back and allowing certain old style politics to take place, allowing people to nominate their own people for positions in the state governments, for example, or at least promising to do so. That has provoked an improvement but its still a very difficult relationship. So this is the assessment of the bolsonaro government governability, which is their ability to approve laws very interesting to them. Its still not high. Its 4. 4. That was in may. Its still about that. Not much above five right now. You might ask them how is it possible that Economic Reforms are going to happen. And i have a lot of subscribers in the u. S. That ask me how is pension reform ever going to pass if you have this type of relationship. Bolsonaro has the luck of having sort of a shared agenda with the leaders of congress. The speaker of the house is not moving forward with pension reform to help bolsonaro. Hes doing that because he believes it will help himself, his own political agenda. There is a shared understanding in congress that this has to happen. We see on a somewhat conservative number that about 84 chance of the reform being approved at the moment. Its very high. There is not an organized movement around brazil to be opposed to the reform. There are pockets of resistance, but not in an organized way that would actually impede this from moving forward. Something else that we do is together with asking congressmen their opinions, we also do our own assessment based on how they behave on social media, our own conversations with congressmen at the parliament in brazil. And also the historic data of their voting. We put all that together to measure chances of approval or to see how each congress is going to vote Going Forward. When congressmen vote together with the government following the advice of the leadership of government, we call that a high governability. This is actually a historic graph that shows since this second government, how the governmentability mo governability moved forward in brazil. You can see that its 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. Since the beginning of the bolsonaro government, you saw a very sharp drop when the relationship with congressman was very bad and congress was sending some messages to government approving bills and other things that the government felt would be damaging to their budget operation to send that message. But it went right up again. Like i said, the shared agenda and also says that theyre not going to put to vote something that they dont think are going to be approved anyway. So people take out of the agenda voting in congress measures that they dont think are going to be approved. That helps the index go up. Bolsonaro is not at the height. He has never reached that point. But its not so low as to prevent approvals of measures either. This is just for bolsonaro and it shows just the frequency of votes together with what the government wants. We did see that drop right at the beginning that was very strong when those messages were being sent. They were saying, look, if you dont change the way you talk to us, this is not going to work. But it went up again. Its at a level that things can still pass. And we still think theres an 85 more or less governability index, which is the likelihood that congress will vote together with the expectations of leaders of government in parliament because of what i mentioned about the shared agenda. And we calculate there about 350 deputies that vote measure often than not together with government, which is a high number. Its more than enough to pass even constitutional amendments in brazil. The new representatives that we had a very big turn around of new people coming into congress in the last election, the newly elected ones are more likely to vote with government than the older ones. And here we see how we divide the parties in Congress Based on whether or not they are more on the government side or less. The blue ones are more likely to vote together with government. You see in terms of number of parties its way higher than people there are neutral and people there are opposed to government period. So the opposition, you can basically count as the workers party. Those are the most antagonistic. But it doesnt go much beyond that in terms of people that are going to just be against the bolsonaro government in every stance that they have. This is just a division of parties by the numbers. Just to finish on the pension reform, this is our historic lines of support for the plans of the government. Weve seen a steady increase of support. This graph is f