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.
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.
