Step aside ‘House of Cards’: There’s no topping Brazil

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil – Brazilian politics looks a lot like a dark and twisted TV series these days, complete with tales of betrayal, wire-tapped phone calls and a corruption scandal reaching into the highest halls of power.

The twin political and economic crises racking the country have left many Brazilians outraged, and others turning to laughter to get them through.

“A famous businessman with ties to the president is arrested in the middle of an economic crisis: did this happen on House of Cards, in Brazil or both?” mischievously asks a quiz on website Nexo, playing on the sometimes uncanny similarities between the Netflix political drama and Brazilian real life.

The answer, as for many of the 10 questions – spoiler alert – is “both.”

The quiz relishes in the seemingly never-ending drama of the corruption scandal at Brazilian state oil company Petrobras, which has felled a long list of powerful business execs and politicians, with plenty of intrigue, dirty dealings and back-stabbing along the way.

Another imaginative Brazilian recreated the opening sequence of House of Cards – same music, same sequence of shots – but set in Brasilia, with long takes of the seats of power in the South American country’s modernist capital.

The names of the main characters appear one by one.

Dilma Rousseff, in the role of the president facing impeachment; Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, as her predecessor and mentor now threatened by corruption charges; Michel Temer, the vice president awaiting his turn; Eduardo Cunha, the congressional speaker leading the impeachment charge even as he himself faces graft allegations.

Frank Underwood approves

The creators of “House of Cards” have taken note.

The show’s Twitter account posted a video in which Kevin Spacey, who plays Machiavellian US President Frank Underwood, slowly nods, a sarcastic smile on his lips: “Watching today’s Brazilian news coverage.”

Watching today’s Brazilian news coverage. pic.twitter.com/ojlEjXuVje

— House of Cards (@HouseofCards) March 16, 2016

Amid their outrage, the rival protesters who have taken to the streets – one camp demanding the president’s departure, the other condemning a “coup” – have also sought to tap the humor of the tense situation.

After a furious Lula responded to being briefly detained for questioning in the Petrobras investigation, he compared himself to a poisonous “snake” still poised to bite.

At the next protests, demonstrators brandished giant cloth snakes, some with the leftist icon’s head.

When Rousseff appointed Lula as her chief of staff – a move opponents condemned as a bid to avoid his arrest – Twitter users gleefully quoted back to the ex-presidents his own words as a rabble-rousing union leader in the 1980s: “In Brazil, when a poor person steals, he goes to prison. When a rich person steals, he becomes a cabinet minister!”

When a judge blocked Lula’s cabinet appointment, just hours after Rousseff swore him in, satirical news site Ole do Brasil published a list of “24 things that last longer than Lula as chief of staff” – an iPhone battery, long-distance relationships, the average Brazilian’s paycheck.

Another humor site, G17, poked fun at the vice president waiting in the wings: “Maid sees Temer trying on presidential sash in front of mirror.”

The leftist government’s supporters have their own jokes.

“Why don’t you hear anti-government demonstrators banging pans (a South American protest tradition) in rich neighborhoods? Because they don’t know where their maids put them.”

An adult website jumped into the fray Monday, March 21, with a discount for scandal-tainted politicians.

“The campaign is an invitation to lawmakers to keep the orgy on our website and stop screwing Congress,” said the site, Sexlog.com. – Katell Abiven, AFP / Rappler.com