Love is dead,” say disillusioned Brazilian youth. They’ve lost faith in Brazil’s Workers’ Party (PT), in their former champion, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and in their government.

The militancy of the country’s socialist left is being put to the test this year. The essential issue is the difficulty of defending the independence of working-class interests facing two foes: the current incarnation of the PT and their mainstream allies, and the PT’s political opponents, the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) and its right-wing counterparts.

Some sectors of the right-wing opposition, led by Eduardo Cunha, the president of the chamber of deputies, and Aécio Neves, the defeated 2014 PSDB presidential candidate, are rallying to impeach Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s president and the PT’s leader. Behind them are the two million people, mostly members of the middle class, who took to the streets to protest last March.