Perhaps the most politically significant moment in the two weeks of popular protests that have shaken Brazil came at the opening ceremony for the Confederations Cup last Saturday. In Brasilia's brand new football stadium, the crowd rose to their feet, turned their backs on the national team and loudly booed the president, Dilma Rousseff.

It was not exactly a Nicolae Ceausescu moment, and talk of a "Brazilian spring" is overblown – but the crowd's reaction shows a dissatisfaction with Brazilian politics that was latent until now.

Hundreds of thousands have marched in demonstrations protesting against the rising cost of living, government corruption and the costs of staging major "prestige" events such as the World Cup and the Olympics.

Political protests are nothing new in Brazil, nor is the extreme violence with which they are often dealt by the police. What marks the current wave out is not just that they are bigger than usual, but a sense that they represent a much broader and still not entirely articulated sentiment.

It started with protests against a 20 centavo (about 6p) rise in bus fares in São Paulo. Stones were thrown and acts of vandalism carried out during some protests. The police responded with teargas, pepper-spray and rubber bullets, injuring journalists and passersby, as well as the protesters themselves. The images spread quickly across YouTube and Facebook, with many drawing links between what was happening in Brazil and the events in Turkey.

This is probably the best comparison, because, like Turkey, Brazil has a government that is mainly supported by nation's poor and has made some progress in some of the country's systemic economic and social problems. The reforms have halted in recent years and the political governing class is increasingly seen as arrogant and out-of-touch. As in Turkey, the protest movement is led by mainly young, middle-class activists whose political philosophy does not conform to the traditional left-right dichotomy. If there is a single demand they are making it can probably best be summed up as the "right to citizenship".

Citizenship involves people holding governments to account and a real choice between parties. Unfortunately Brazilian politics has become increasingly dominated by patronage, clientelism and ever more expensive marketing campaigns, which duck the difficult discussions.

The political ambiguity surrounding the protests makes their impact harder to gauge. The government has repeatedly supported the right of demonstrators to protest peacefully, implicitly criticising the actions of various state governors who have authorised heavy-handed policing. These have retorted that rising inflation, an underlying theme of the protests, is a result of the government's mistaken economic policies. With elections due next year and President Rousseff's main opponent likely to be from the right-of-centre Social Democratic party (PSDB), both sides are effectively staking out the ground that they wish to contest.

Brazil escaped the worst of the world's financial crisis, but growth has slowed perceptibly and this makes the choices it now faces much harder. Brazilian taxes are relatively high, but its social services and infrastructure are appallingly bad. One complaint of the protesters is why should they have to pay so much for so little?

While it is tempting to blame all this on government corruption – another slogan of the protesters – clearly there are also choices to be made about spending priorities. President Rousseff – and her predecessor, "Lula", – consciously targeted spending on social programmes, such as Bolsa Familia, which have succeeded in lifting millions of Brazilians out of poverty, but failed to tackle other grossly wasteful and regressive elements of state spending. The opposition shows a similar lack of enthusiasm for such reforms.

But without reform, the protests are likely to continue and this is exposing further fault-lines in the relationship between the government and the governed. One of the most debated actions carried out by the police during their violent clampdown in São Paulo was the arrest of people for carrying vinegar. This is a perfectly lawful and nonviolent activity. Its subversive intent lies in that it can be used to lessen the impact of teargas, canisters of which the police fired arbitrarily into crowds of commuters. If the authorities believe that this is a legitimate exercise in state power, then perhaps the right to citizenship really is a revolutionary demand.