WHEN a president has single-figure approval ratings, faces calls for her impeachment, and has lost control of her political base, is she in a position to play hardball with the country’s legislators? Brazilians will soon find out.

On August 31st Dilma Rousseff, their president, sent Congress a budget for 2016 with a gaping primary deficit (before interest payments) of 30.5 billion reais ($8 billion), or 0.5% of GDP, challenging its members to close the gap. It was a break with the sound-money practices that have underpinned Brazil’s economy. It was, some critics say, illegal. Certainly nothing similar has happened since at least 2000, when Fernando Henrique Cardoso, then the president, transformed public finances.

On a charitable view, Ms Rousseff was shocking legislators into making hard decisions rather than simply blocking her fiscal proposals. A harsher reading is that she does not know how to lead Brazil out of recession. The markets took that view. The day after the budget bombshell, the Ibovespa stock index fell over 2% and the currency closed at 3.7 per dollar, its lowest since December 2002.  On September 2nd, the central bank held steady a key interest rate it had been raising since last year.

Public finances have already deteriorated this year. Having originally planned a primary surplus of 1.1%, in July the government cut that target to just 0.15%, as interest rates rose and tax receipts fell. The total deficit this year will be 8-9% of GDP. In August Moody’s, a rating agency, cut its assessment of Brazil by a notch to just above junk status. It hinted at worse to come by calling the latest news a sign of “the fiscal challenges that Brazil continues to face”.

The risk of a downgrade is one reason for the pessimism which, some pundits think, is now the prevailing mood in the corridors of power. “The government is basically throwing in the towel,” says Alberto Ramos, an economist with Goldman Sachs, an investment bank.

Ms Rousseff is in a tight corner. She issued her budget after scrapping a plan to reinstate a tax on financial transactions that would have brought in 80 billion reais in 2016. She retreated after her vice-president, Michel Temer, rejected the idea and told her Congress would block it. Several opposition figures say that, far from finding a way to make Congress do homework, the president has broken a fiscal-responsibility law enacted in 2000 as part of an effort to mend Brazil’s finances after decades of chaos. They say they may take her to court.

On this point, the president may be right. Mansueto Almeida, an economist who is critical of Ms Rousseff, says that though the law requires the executive to show how its spending will be funded, it allows a rise in debt. Júlio Marcelo de Oliveira, a prosecutor for the Federal Court of Accounts, agreed that the president, whose alleged budgetary misdeeds he has previously investigated, acted legally this time.

Legal or not, the president’s move weakens her American-trained finance minister, Joaquim Levy, who was reported to have lobbied for further spending cuts and was a reassuring figure for markets. Ms Rousseff has consistently failed to hit economic targets since being elected in 2010, but in the early days she dodged the political flak. Many people blamed her then finance minister, Guido Mantega, who was known for over-promising. Replacing him with Mr Levy was supposed to fix that problem; his loss of face bodes ill.

To restore credibility, Mr Ramos argues, the government needs to end up with a primary surplus of 3.0-3.5% of GDP. Simply stabilising the debt-to-GDP radio is not good enough, he says: it is already too high. At a minimum, tough horse-trading with Congress looms. Renan Calheiros, the president of Brazil’s Senate who has had several rows with Ms Rousseff this year, said on September 1st he would not send the budget back to her, as many opposition people want. “It is up to Congress to improve it,” he accepted. And on any fair assessment, Congress shares a lot of blame for Brazil’s economic woes; for example, it neutered many of Mr Levy’s better ideas.

Waxing and waning: Brazil’s economic woes, in charts

Is there any way out? It looks unlikely that tax rises can be avoided: about 90% of the budget is ring-fenced, leaving little discretion for spending cuts. If the government were strong and confident, it might acknowledge the need for a short-term rise in debt while seeking ways to limit spending on pensions, health and education, and laying out a long-term plan to restore fiscal health. But pushing such reforms through Congress would take political will and capital, and this was not done during Brazil’s boom years when it would have been easier. Now, says Mr Almeida, “We are paying for all of the mistakes [of] the past five years.” The mystery, he adds, is why Brazil has not lost its investment grade already.

JOB centres are rarely upbeat places. In Brazil, where they are often a last resort for those who lack the personal connections that lubricate much of life in the country, they can be particularly bleak. Francisco, a 54-year-old driver queuing at one in downtown São Paulo, has had no work for over two years. The lines have never been longer, he sighs. “It’s the crisis.”

Brazil’s growth has been anaemic for years. It averaged 2% a year during President Dilma Rousseff’s first term in office from 2011 to 2014—despite booming global demand for the country’s soyabeans, iron ore and oil. Government meddling with the private sector, combined with excessively loose monetary and fiscal policy, sapped confidence; investment dried up and inflation soared. Without the crutch of high commodity prices, GDP has now collapsed (by 1.9% in the second quarter of 2015, compared with the first), pulling the hitherto resilient labour market with it.

Nearly 500,000 jobs have been cut since January. Researchers at Fundação Getulio Vargas, a business school, reckon another 2.5m will be shed before the end of 2016. Unemployment rose to 7.5% in July, from 4.9% a year earlier—the fastest annual rise on record (see chart 1). It is expected to hit roughly 10% at the end of next year, and stay there for some time. Speak to Brazilians and it is hard to find anyone without a friend or family member on the dole.

From flophouses to boardrooms, moods darkened further in the wake of the decision last week by Standard & Poor’s to demote Brazil’s debt to junk status, following Ms Rousseff’s inept efforts to cast onto an unco-operative Congress the responsibility for balancing the budget. The rating agency subsequently downgraded dozens of big Brazilian companies, including several large banks. Petrobras, the state-controlled energy firm which is also at the centre of Brazil’s biggest-ever corruption scandal, earned another dubious distinction as the world’s largest company without an investment-grade credit rating. At the start of the year Petrobras accounted for about one-tenth of total Brazilian investment; now it may need to trim its capital expenditure by even more than the 40% it announced in June.

S&P’s decision mainly reflected pre-existing worries about the Brazilian economy. Neither the stockmarket nor the real—down by 30% against the dollar since January—nosedived in the days after the announcement; this suggested that a return to junk status had largely been priced in. But the news has certainly added to the gloom. Already-high borrowing costs for both the public and private sector will rise, and with them the risk of further downgrades. Pension and mutual funds that can only hold investment-grade assets will offload Brazilian bonds at a brisker pace, in anticipation of similar moves by Moody’s and Fitch. (Typically, two of the big three rating agencies need to slap a “junk” label on a country’s bonds before such funds are obliged to divest.)

This will not cripple the Brazil of today, with its diversified economy and plump foreign-exchange reserves, as it might have in earlier, more chaotic times. Ilan Goldfajn of Itaú, a big Brazilian bank, expects net inflows into Brazil’s capital markets to bottom out at $10 billion in 2016, down from $45 billion in 2014.

But divestment will make it harder for Brazil to shake off its worst recession in decades. This week analysts polled by the Central Bank once again once took an axe to growth forecasts (see chart 2). The OECD, a rich-country club, thinks GDP could shrink by 2.8% this year and 0.7% next. A weaker currency has stoked inflation, which the Central Bank has been trying hard to quench with (contractionary) interest-rate rises. This has failed to boost exporters much—leaving aside Brazil’s hyper-competitive farmers. Few expect growth to rebound before 2018, when the next presidential election is due. Income per person, which peaked in 2011, may take longer to recover.

Waxing and waning: Brazil’s economic woes, in charts

Since disavowing the interventionist policies of her first term, Ms Rousseff has tried, unsuccessfully, to pick a path between fiscal orthodoxy, championed by her finance chief, and stimulus demanded by her planning minister and many in her left-wing Workers’ Party. To appease the former camp, on September 14th the government presented another set of belt-tightening measures worth 65 billion reais ($17 billion), including a pay freeze for some public servants and a controversial tax on financial transactions.

Just like the government’s earlier efforts, these look half-hearted: insufficient to repair public finances and unleash a spirit of exuberance, but more than enough to enrage Congress, over which the increasingly unpopular president has no control and where a movement to oust her is gaining steam. Ms Rousseff is clinging on to her job for the time being. Many ordinary Brazilians have not been so lucky.