Last week marked the one-year anniversary of the impeachment of former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff. The removal of the Workers’ Party (PT) leader paved the way for her vice president, Michel Temer of the neoliberal Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), to assume power and institute a stunning rollback of social and workers’ rights. He called his plan, which decimates public spending, attacks political diversity in schools, deepens precarity, and accelerates environmental destruction, the “Bridge to the Future.”

In the municipal elections following Temer’s ascension to the presidency, it appeared that his “bridge” would be fortified by an unchallenged right in every corner of the country. Temer’s party won almost a thousand mayoral races, making the PMDB the ruling party in one-fifth of the country’s municipalities. Coming in second was the right-wing Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), which also conquered hundreds of municipalities and pulled off a huge coup with the election of its TV businessman candidate João Doria to the mayoralty of South America’s largest city, São Paulo. The PT, on the other hand, suffered setbacks everywhere, losing 60 percent of the cities it controlled in 2012.

Perhaps that’s why, in December, Temer imagined his latest attack — a draconian pension reform — would go down easier than it has. The original proposal would set a new minimum age for retirement — sixty-five years — eleven years ahead of the current average retirement age. The bill mostly applies to younger workers, but men over fifty and women over forty-five would suffer a 50 percent increase in their remaining contribution time — economese for “now you have to double the time you work for the pension you’ve already earned.” It would also add five years onto when low-income elderly could begin collecting extra support. It would delink pensions from the already-low minimum wage. And it would seek to eliminate special provisions for Brazil’s public-sector workers, a move clearly in keeping with Temer’s broader privatization agenda.