In spite of the favorable press he has received over the last few years, Lula da Silva has always led a populist model . Certainly, the global left tried to present him as a convicted and self-confessed democrat, but Latin Americans know that, historically, populist donors are precarious democrats, because they deform at will the institutional model , undermine the rule of law and ultimately written request, instrumentalize the public administration with a double purpose: to generate political clientele while proclaiming social inclusion.

On the real level, no state can close the poverty gap if it is not prepared to do so. An ineffective state necessarily generates ineffective policies. A State in which there is no separation of powers is incapable of exercising control. And without legal-political control, model collapses. Therefore, in order to develop quality public policies, the State must prepare itself through gradual, sectoral reforms that improve its implementation capacity.

Lula employed another logic: more state is better government. Thus, the Partido dos Trabalhadores opted for promote from its voluntarist watchtower to artificially reduce poverty through direct subsidies and gifts on state letterhead. The PT State has transferred resources while generating few real capabilities in the population. The populist welfarism of Lulismo has created a web of corruption that instead of improving the performance of public administration has multiplied the islands of opacity, aggravating state distortions. When agencies design and develop inefficient and overvalued policies with ambiguous impact, they generate incentives for the emergence of social violence.

Since taking office, Dilma Rousseff has not lifted a finger to change this model, designed and implemented by her party colleagues, under the supervision of Lula, her mentor. The Brazilian President is incapable of transforming model because the Republic is in the hands of the PT Moreover, welfarism is the quintessence of Lulismo. Cutting clientelist networks, reforming the State by streamlining it and redesigning the public administration to provide better quality services is as much as dismantling, cutting and weakening the supreme creation of Lulismo: a large State, a large Government, social programs in which the country's wealth has been employee thoroughly.

Hence the strictly political solution: "so that everything stays the same, let's transfer the problem to the population", even knowing that the electorate does not have the technical capacity to carry out the reform. A public policy reform has to be led by technocrats and those who belong to the ranks of Lulismo have provoked this crisis.

That is why the referendum card is a diversionary maneuver, used in Latin America to gain time while the internal front is reorganized and the initiative is recovered. At this point, a plebiscite will not solve the serious crisis of a tropical Leviathan accustomed to expand under the charismatic iron rule of Lula and the Workers' Party.