A dream deferred

VINICIUS RABELO’S grandparents were manioc farmers in the interior of Bahia. His parents moved to the city for a better life and, after opening a clothes shop, sent their children to private school. In 2018 Mr Rabelo started as an electrical mechanic in Camaçari, near the state capital, Salvador. Home to a petrochemical plant and a Ford factory, Camaçari had almost doubled in population over his lifetime. More than 40m Brazilians had joined an emerging middle class known as Classe C.

By the time he entered the workforce, the country was reeling from a recession that chopped 9% off GDP per head between 2014 and 2016. Unemployment stayed high and hundreds of factories closed. In January Ford said it was leaving. For 5,000 employees and tens of thousands of indirect workers, including Mr Rabelo, whose firm did safety checks, the job loss was compounded by a sense that social mobility had stopped. The 24-year-old, who has trendy glasses and an Apple Watch, now drives for Uber, “like 800 others who got laid off and had the exact same idea”.

Under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso in the 1990s, Brazil’s RealPlan ended hyperinflation, allowing Brazilians to start saving again. Under Lula in the 2000s, poverty fell by 41% thanks to a commodity boom, social programmes and rises in the minimum wage. The...