At times over the past five or six years, it has been easy to get the impression that Brazilian politics does not matter very much. Nightly TV news reports of corruption seem to have no more relevance to the country’s real development prospects than the soap operas that precede them.

The main newspapers are full of political intrigue but, for much of the business community, especially the foreign investors who have ploughed billions of dollars into the country in recent years, none of it is of any moment. Since President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva embraced economic orthodoxy six years ago, it has been often been impossible to distinguish the politics of his left-wing Workers’ party with those of the main opposition party, the Brazilian Social Democratic party of former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso. As Christopher Garman, head of Latin America at the New York-based political risk consultancy, Eurasia Group, puts it: “We are in cruise control.”