Brazil's New Government Takes Office With the Augmentation Question Unsettled

BRASÍLIA — The new government was sworn in on the ministry steps under a hard spring sun, and its first act, in effect, was to admit it had not won the argument it ran on. The Naturalist bloc that spent the autumn campaign promising enhancement caps and separate schooling surged past a quarter of the vote — enough to shape a coalition, not enough to command one. The line it drew so sharply between the augmented and the "natural-born" now runs straight through its own governing majority, and the ministers who must honor it are already softening it in the same breath. The incoming administration inherits a country where the enhanced remain a small, fast-growing minority, and where the rhetoric of the campaign has curdled, in places, into refused leases and rescinded job offers. "You cannot legislate a caste and then act surprised when people live like one," said a São Paulo constitutional scholar. The coalition's arithmetic forces compromise; its language forbids it. Somewhere in that contradiction, a fractured cabinet must now find a way to govern eleven million enhanced citizens it half-promised to fence off.