Growing popular resentment of the military could not be contained indefinitely, especially when the economy turned sour. By the late 1970s debt, rising inflation and unemployment were turning the economy from a success story into a joke, and the military were further embarrassed by an unsavoury chain of corruption scandals. Geisel was the first military president to plan for a return to civilian rule, in a slow relaxing of the military grip called abertura, the "opening-up". Yet again, Brazil managed a bloodless - albeit fiendishly complicated - transition. Slow though the process was, the return to democracy would have been delayed even longer had it not been for two events along the way: the metalworkers' strikes in São Paulo in 1977 and the mass campaign for direct elections in 1983-84.

The São Paulo strikes began in the car industry and soon spread throughout the industrial belt of São Paulo, in a movement bearing many parallels with Solidarity in Poland. Led by unions that were still illegal, and the charismatic young factory worker Lula (Luís Inácio da Silva) , there was a tense stand-off between army and strikers, until the military realized that having São Paulo on strike would be worse for the economy than conceding the right to free trade unions. This dramatic re-emergence of organized labour was a sign that the military could not control the situation for much longer.

Reforms in the early 1980s lifted censorship, brought the exiles home and allowed normal political life to resume. But the military came up with an ingenious attempt to control the succession: their control of Congress allowed them to pass a resolution that the president due to take office in 1985 would be elected not by direct vote, but by an electoral college, made up of congressmen and senators, where the military party had the advantage.

The democratic opposition responded with a counter-amendment proposing a direct election. It needed a two-thirds majority in Congress to be passed, and a campaign began for diretas-já , "elections now". Even the opposition was surprised by the response, as the Brazilian people, thoroughly sick of the generals, took to the streets in their millions. The campaign culminated in huge rallies of over a million people in Rio and São Paulo, and opinion polls showed over ninety percent in favour; but when the vote came in March 1984 the amendment just failed. The military still nominated a third of Senate seats, and this proved decisive.

It looked like defeat; in fact it turned into victory. The moment found the man in Tancredo Neves , ex-minister of justice under Vargas, ex-prime minister, and a wise old mineiro fox respected across the political spectrum, who put himself forward as opposition candidate in the electoral college. By now it was clear what the public wanted, and Tancredo's unrivalled political skills enabled him to stitch together an alliance that included dissidents from the military's own party. In January 1985 he romped home in the electoral college, to great national rejoicing, and military rule came to an end. Tancredo proclaimed the civilian Nova República - the "New Republic".