The extreme political polarization witnessed during this year’s Brazilian presidential election is connected to the class divisions exacerbated by the Workers’ Party’s public policies which ignored the middle class. This was the main conclusion of a recent study published by the World Inequality Lab, authored by Amory Gethin and Marc Morgan, combining inequality statistics and opinion polls to try and contextualize the current moment of Brazil.
The nine-page report, entitled Brazil Divided: Hindsights on the Growing Politicisation of Inequality, argues that the Workers’ Party’s focus on creating public policies for the...