Brazil is today in the grip of a terrifying far-right regime, as Jair Bolsonaro’s government embarks on rolling back decades of advances for workers, women, and LGBT people. His election campaign was notable for the often-violent mobilization of paramilitary forces and the organized Right. Yet his success did not come from a vacuum. Bolsonaro’s rise to power was just the latest low point in a political crisis including the judicial coup against Dilma Rousseff’s center-left Workers’ Party (PT) government and the damaging imposition of austerity on the Brazilian economy by Dilma herself as well as interim president Michel Temer.

Indeed, the economic turmoil of recent years already marked the undoing of many of the advances made by the PT in power, while also highlighting its contradictions of that party. This is highlighted in a new book, Economy for the Few: The Social Impact of Fiscal Policy in Brazil. Here, economists Esther Dweck, Ana Luíza Matos de Oliveira, and Pedro Rossi show that austerity, presented in Brazil as a “technical necessity representing the only option,” was in fact a “deliberate policy choice.” Its consequences were disastrous.

Jacobin’s Giacomo Gabbuti and David Broder spoke to the authors about the economic conditions for Bolsanaro’s rise, the advances made by the PT (and their limits), and the lessons for the Latin American left.