Michel Temer (third from the left) in his swearing-in ceremony in the Senate shortly after Dilma Rousseff was impeached. Credit: Beto Barata/PR

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 1 2016 (IPS)

The dismissal of now ex-president Dilma Rousseff brings to a close a turbulent chapter of Brazil’s crisis, but does nothing to clear up the doubts that threaten the political system and the economy of Latin America’s powerhouse.

The Senate voted 61-20 on Wednesday Aug. 31 to impeach Brazil’s first female president for budget irregularities, putting an end to 13 years of rule by her left-wing Workers’ Party (PT).

She had been in office since 2011, and was suspended in May, less than halfway through her second term.Her predecessor was the PT’s founder Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011).

Michel Temer, who was Rousseff’s vice president and served as interim president since May 12, was sworn in on Wednesday as the country’s new leader. He will face challenges that require unpopular measures.

A large part of the lawmakers belonging to the parties that back him are facing corruption charges or are under investigation by the public prosecutor’s office.

Temer, described as uncharismatic and dour, has been implicated in a corruption probe, accused of soliciting illicit funds for election campaigns of members of his Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB).

The president and members of the legislature can only be tried by the Supreme Court and it is unlikely to hand down a sentence against Temer before the end of the current four-year term.

Temer is also facing a legal challenge from the TSE electoral court for alleged abuse of economic and political power while in office as Rousseff’s vice president. Reports of corruption aggravated things for both Rousseff and Temer.

The TSE ruling is not expected until 2017, and could annul the results of the 2014 elections. If that happens, Congress will choose a new president, to complete the current term, which ends the last day of 2018.

Operation Car Wash, which is investigating corruption in the state-run oil giant Petrobras and has led to charges against dozens of businesspersons and politicians, threatens to bring down a number of lawmakers when the Supreme Court starts to try the implicated legislators.

Until then, the accusations will throw a shadow over the legitimacy of a weak government subjected to bombardment from the left-wing opposition, which accuses it of being the result of a “parliamentary coup”, as Rousseff repeated over and over again during her impeachment trial.

The new government has announced fiscal adjustments, including a constitutional amendment to limit public spending growth for up to 20 years, which would oblige the government to limit annual spending growth to the prior year’s inflation rate.

Dilma Rousseff smiles during her speech in Brasilia on Aug. 31, after she was ousted as president of Brazil by the Senate, an outcome that came as no surprise, although unexpectedly she was not banned from politics. Credit: Lula Marques/ AGPTl

That means economic growth, once Brazil has emerged from the current recession, would be accompanied by a reduction of the deficit.

But analysts doubt that the measure will be approved by a Congress traditionally opposed to austerity measures, especially given the fact that it would require a constitutional amendment, which would need a 60 percent majority to be approved.

Another measure considered indispensable to shore up public accounts, raising the retirement age, will also face heavy resistance in Congress and from trade unions and social movements.

Temer, however, has the support of a parliamentary majority strengthened by their victory in the impeachment trial and the vote of confidence they enjoy, for now at least, from the powerful business community.

On Apr. 17,71.5 percent of the 513 members of the lower house voted in favour of an impeachment trial; 75 percent of the Senate approved her ouster on Aug. 31; and similar majorities were seen in other votes prior to the start of the impeachment process.

Ousted but not banned

The bloc was only divided towards the end of the impeachment trial, when the Senate decided not to ban her from politics for eight years, which would have required a two-thirds majority – 54 senators – but only took 42 votes. The measure would basically have ended the political career of the 68-year-old Rousseff.

It was a conciliatory gesture offered by a portion of the new ruling parties, especially the PMDB, after the escalating attacks during the impeachment process, which began in December when the then speaker of the lower house of Congress Eduardo Cunhagave the go-ahead to the proceedings after accepting one of 37 motions to impeach her.

During the final six-day impeachment trial, Rousseff and her supporters described the process as “a coup against democracy,” “betrayal” and a “farce”, and called advocates of the proceedings “demagogues,” “irresponsible,” “liars,” and “corrupt” generators of “economic chaos”.

Rousseff argued that she did not commit any crime.But the prosecution maintained that using state bank funds to conceal a looming deficit and increasing public spending without authorisation from the legislature amounted to “crimes of responsibility”, one of the grounds for impeachment under the constitution.

Even legal experts expressed views that fed the argument that the impeachment was a “coup”, with some observers going so far as to compare it to the 1964 military coup d’etat that ushered in a 21-year dictatorship.

But the economic crisis, especially the huge public deficit that has built up over the last few years, weakened Rousseff, who was accused of concealing the serious financial situation during her 2014 reelection campaign.

Rousseff blamed the recession that began in 2014 on the crash in international commodity prices and policies adopted by rich countries, aggravated by the legislative boycott of her proposed initiatives in 2015.

Only voters can decide on the legitimacy of a government in a presidentialist regime, argued Rousseff and her allies, ruling out the possibility of impeachment, which was first used in 1992 to remove Fernando Collor (1990-1992) and attempted many times against Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003).

The fall of Rousseff and the PT “is part of a global decline of the left, which is stronger in Latin America, where governments are facing severe economic recessions,” University of Brasilia Professor Elimar Nascimento told IPS.

In the region, he said, “leftist thinking, which lives on fantasies of the past, and is incapable of comprehending change, is showing a lot of wear and tear” – part of a pendular movement after 15 years of mainly left-wing governments in the region.

“I never thought I’d have to fight against a coup d’etat in Brazil again,” said Dilma Rousseff after she was suspended as president on Thursday May 12, before embracing former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva outside the government palace. Credit: Ricardo Stuckert/Lula Institute

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 12 2016 (IPS)

Ironically, the only two economists who have served as president of Brazil are also the only ones impeached for economic failures.

Dilma Rousseff, in office since January 2011, was suspended by a vote of 55 to 22 in the Senate on the morning of Thursday, May 12 after a marathon 21-hour session.

The impeachment trial may take up to180 days, during which time Vice President Michel Temer will assume the presidency.

If at least 54 of the 81 senators – a two-thirds majority – vote to remove Rousseff at the end of the trial, Temer will serve as president until Jan. 1, 2019.The impeachment trial is political; the president will be removed if two-thirds of the senators decide that there are grounds for such a move, independently of strictly legal arguments.

Analysts agree that it is highly unlikely that Rousseff, of the left-wing Workers’ Party (PT), will return to power, after the overwhelming defeats she has suffered – first in the Chamber of Deputies, where 71.5 percent of the lawmakers gave the green light to the impeachment proceedings, and now in the Senate.

The most likely scenario is a repeat of the case of Fernando Collor de Mello, elected president in 1989 and impeached in 1992, after a four-month trial.

But there are many differences between the two cases.

Rousseff is not accused of corruption, but of using creative accounting to hide large budget deficits. And she still has the firm support of a significant minority made up of left-wing parties and social movements capable of mobilising huge public protests.

By contrast, Collor de Mello was completely isolated, supported only by a tiny party created to formalise his candidacy. His impeachment was the result of a virtual consensus.

But there are also similarities. Both economists lost their political base due to reckless management of the economy.

When he took office, Collor de Mello immediately froze people’s bank accounts, to curb hyperinflation, releasing only small amounts for essential household expenses.

In 1990, GDP fell 4.3 percent, while unemployment soared and companies went under. The popularity of Brazil’s youngest president, who was 40 when he took office, took a nosedive. And when a corruption scandal broke out two years later, the conditions for impeachment were in place.

In the case of Rousseff, the decline of the economy took longer. Starting at the end of her first term (2011-2014), the recession turned into full-blown depression, with a 3.8 percent drop in GDP in 2015 and a continued downturn in 2016.

Consumption subsidies, tax cuts to give certain sectors a boost, and artificial caps on fuel and electricity prices are among the anti-inflationary or pro-growth measures that led to disaster, especially in the fiscal area.

Michel Temer signs the official Senate notification of Dilma Rousseff’s suspension, which made him interim president, on Thursday May 12. Credit: Marcos Corrêa/VPR

Another thing Collor de Mello and Rousseff have in common is that they misled voters in their campaigns.

Collor de Mello was elected in 1989 after accusing his opponent, trade union leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the PT (who was finally elected president in 2003) of preparing to freeze bank accounts – the very measure that Collor de Mello himself adopted on his first day in office.

Rousseff accused her opponents, during her 2014 reelection campaign, of seeking a fiscal adjustment that she herself tried to push through in her second term. And she hid the scope of the government’s deficit problem and announced an expansion of social programmes that was not economically feasible, due to a lack of funds.

These errors helped spawn the movement for her impeachment, the mayor of São Paulo, Fernando Haddad of the PT, acknowledged in a May 6 interview.

The economic crisis was then compounded by the corruption scandal involving the state-run oil company Petrobras. More than 200 members of the business community and politicians have been implicated, including former president Lula and other PT leaders, which has smeared the image of the government, even though Rousseff herself is in the clear.

This backdrop strengthened allegations that Rousseff violated fiscal responsibility laws by signing decrees increasing public spending without authorisation and by obtaining loans to the federal government from state-owned banks, which is illegal.

These two measures would amount to “crimes of responsibility”, which according to the constitution provide grounds for impeachment. And they allegedly aggravated the fiscal deficit, the key factor in the economic crisis.

Attorney General José Eduardo Cardozo, who represented Rousseff, and ruling coalition legislators rejected the accusations, arguing that the government decrees merely redistributed funds to other areas and that the government’s delayed payments to the state banks did not constitute illegal loans.

A group of weary senators applaud at the end of the marathon session that decided to immediately suspend President Dilma Rousseff during an impeachment trial for her removal. Credit: Marcos Oliveira/Agência Senado

Dozens of mayors and state governors, as well as former presidents, have used the same accounting maneuvers without being punished in any way, said Senator Otto Alencar of the Social Democratic Party, a majority of whose members voted against Rousseff.

Whatever the case, the trial is political; the president will be removed if two-thirds of the senators decide that there are grounds for such a move, independently of strictly legal arguments.

In the all-night session, the 78 senators (only three were absent) heard 73 speakers who had up to 15 minutes each to speak before the vote.

The result, which was already a given, was a crucial indicator for the opposition: They managed to achieve the two-thirds majority needed to find the president guilty.

However, it is possible that some senators who gave the go-ahead to the impeachment trial will change their position.

At least three senators qualified their votes, clarifying that they were only approving the trial itself because they wanted more in-depth investigations and discussions on presidential responsibility, and that they had not yet decided to vote for Rousseff’s removal.

They included former footballer Romario Faria, a senator for Rio de Janeiro, and Cristovam Buarque, a former governor of Brasilia. They belong to two different socialist parties.

PT senators said there would be a fight, as well as mobilisations to block the “unfair” impeachment. And Rousseff reiterated that she would “fight to the last” against what she called “a coup.”

The vice-president’s rise to president means a heavy concentration of power in the hands of the centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), which has the largest number of mayors, many state governors, the post of president of the Senate, and now the presidency (interim, for now).

A group of six senators from different parties called for an alternative to the “traumatic” impeachment process: early elections to allow the people to choose their leaders.

Many senators, such as Tasso Jereissati of the opposition Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) and Collor de Mello called for political reform, arguing that “coalition presidentialism” has proven to be the source of crisis and instability.

Rousseff’s impeachment also provides an opportunity to debate reforms in the political system.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, her back to the camera, receives a hug on Monday Apr. 18 by one of the minority of lower house legislators who voted against her impeachment the day before. Credit: Roberto Stuckert/PR

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 18 2016 (IPS)

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff would appear to be, as she herself recently said, “a card out of the deck” of those in power, after the crushing defeat she suffered Sunday Apr. 17 in the lower house of Congress, which voted to impeach her. But Brazil’s political crisis is so complex that the final outcome is not a given.

A total of 367 legislators – 71.5 percent, or 25 more than the two-thirds majority needed – voted to impeach her and she now faces a vote in the Senate. Because the makeup of the Senate is similar to that of the Chamber of Deputies, the president’s fate is apparently sealed.

However, the climate of tension in Brazil has brought new surprises almost every week since last year. And the impeachment trial could drag on for over six months, passing through different stages and procedures, under the shadow of storms like the corruption scandal that threatens more than 300 politicians.

The Senate will have about three weeks to decide whether to go ahead with putting the left-wing president on trial for alleged irregularities in last year’s federal budget.

Since the decision only requires a simple majority of 41 out of 81 senators, the assumption is that the impeachment will move forward. The vote will be based on an assessment of the case by a special 21-senator commission that will have 10 working days to turn in its report.

In the next few weeks, Rousseff – whose first term started on Jan. 1, 2011 – will remain in the presidency. But she will have to step aside for 180 days if the Senate votes in favour of a formal impeachment trial. After that, another special commission will investigate, listen to the defence, and draw up a proposal to find her guilty or absolve her.

The trial by the 81 senators would be presided over by the president of the Supreme Court.

Rousseff would be banned from public office for eight years if two-thirds of the senators – 54 – found her guilty. She would be acquitted if she managed to obtain 28 votes in favour, including abstentions and absences.

There are multiple factors that could modify the script as well as the final outcome.

Demonstrators supporting the removal of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff celebrate Sunday Apr. 17 outside the lower house of Congress in Brasilia after it voted to impeach her. “Tchau, querida” (Bye-bye dear) reads one of the signs. Credit: Fábio Rodrigues Pozzebom/ Agência Brasil

The lawmakers pushing for impeachment, who will take power if Rousseff is removed, have all been implicated by the Operação Lava Jato or Operation Car Wash investigation into corruption and could lose their seats as a result of a trial in the Supreme Court, where sitting politicians are tried.

Facing the greatest threat is the speaker of the lower house, Eduardo Cunha, who played a decisive role by speeding things up in the initial phase of the proceedings against Rousseff.

But that role has generated resistance against the impeachment. Cunha, accused of taking millions of dollars in bribes to secure contracts with state oil giant Petrobras, and reported to have illegal bank accounts in Switzerland, is seen as the biggest symbol of corruption, even by some of those who back the president’s removal.

Many members of the Chamber of Deputies took advantage of the moment to accuse Cunha of being a thief or corrupt, when they announced their vote on Sunday. Even some of those who voted in favour of impeachment made an attempt to mark their distance from the speaker of the house.

Deputy Jarbas Vasconcelos, for example, accused Cunha of “casting a stain over” the proceedings and the lower house.

Both of them belong to the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), an ally of the government until last month. If Rousseff is suspended, the party will lead the government and both houses of Congress.

Vice-president Michel Temer, who will become president if Rousseff – reelected to her second term in October 2014 – is impeached, and the president of the Senate, Renán Calheiros, have been signaled as benefiting from the corruption orchestrated by Petrobras, as they both agreed to cooperate with the justice system in exchange for a reduction in any eventual sentence.

The charges and the information provided in the investigation will tend to focus on these three politicians – the vice president and the heads of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate – as they are in line to replace the president.

Rousseff’s supporters stress that she is an exception among the leading protagonists in this battle for power, as the only one who is not facing corruption charges.

Supporters of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff displayed intense disappointment on Sunday Apr. 17 outside the lower house of Congress in Brasilia as the voting reflected an overwhelming majority in favour of impeachment. Credit: Fábio Rodrigues Pozzebom/ Agência Brasil

However, she is isolated now because the left-wing ruling Workers Party’s (PT) image has been battered by accusations that it has diverted public funds since it first came to power in 2003 under former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

New charges and lines of investigation by Operation Car Wash, led by the public prosecutor’s office and the federal police, could modify the political landscape, as has happened in the last few months when it investigated favours allegedly received by Lula from leading construction companies that have carried out large-scale oil industry and hydropower projects.

Another source of uncertainty is the current Superior Electoral Court investigation into the 2014 campaign funds that could invalidate the victory by Rousseff and Temer due to the alleged use of illegal donations coming from bribes from Petrobras contractor companies.

If the 2014 elections outcome is challenged, new elections will be held. But experts believe that this ruling will not come until 2017, and in that case it would be Congress that would elect the new president and vice president who would complete the current term until 2018.

The economic crisis, meanwhile, is only expected to get worse, because an interim government would find it hard to adopt the unpopular measures that economists, and Temer himself, see as indispensable for fighting the recession, such as a fiscal adjustment plan.

A truce is also possible, but it would be hard to accommodate the interests of the nearly two dozen parties in the lower house that helped approve the move to impeach Rousseff. The broad majority that was achieved was due to small and medium-sized parties that joined together with the large opposition parties when the president’s defeat began to look likely.

The big fuel for political decisions lately in Brazil has been the prospect of gaining a share of the power.

The corrosion of the new coalition that would take power will be inevitable, due to internal divisions, the recession and subsequent rise in unemployment, new findings by the corruption investigation and demonstrations by Rousseff’s supporters, which will clearly rise in intensity.

The media, which the left accuses of being biased against Rousseff, Lula and the PT, will likely focus their negative news stories on the new holders of power, accentuating the erosion.

The defence of the president, led by Attorney General José Eduardo Cardozo, disparaged the lower house decision on the impeachment, calling it “purely political” and noting that Rousseff is not facing serious accusations but minor charges which, he said, have “absolutely no background or basis.”

Cardozo argued that this is possible in a parliamentary system, but not in Brazil’s presidentialist system. The proceedings have been criticised as unconstitutional, since Rousseff is not accused of any concrete crime, and a president can’t be impeached only for political reasons, he argued.

These arguments are not likely to modify the Senate’s eventual decision, given the president’s isolation, but they could strengthen the movement against her removal.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

By Fernando J. Cardim de Carvalho
RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 30 2015 (IPS)

As 2015 approaches its end, Brazilians live a period of extraordinary uncertainty. The recession seems to get worse by the day. Inflation is high and shows unexpected resistance to tight monetary policies applied by the Central Bank. The sluggish international economy has largely neutralized incentive and the strong devaluation of the domestic currency could represent a reality to exporters and to producers who compete with now more expensive imports. After an initial resistance, employment levels began to fall.

Fernando J. Cardim de Carvalho

Any subset of that list of events would be enough to generate widespread instability. All of them put together created a hitherto unheard of situation of political and economic crisis of which one has to make extraordinary efforts to see any way out.

Impeachment procedures against the president did not come out of the blue. The revelation of the Petrobras scandal has brewed rumors and suspicions, if not against the president herself, certainly against many of those who surround, or have surrounded, her (she is a former minister of energy in Lula’s government and a former chairman of the administration council of Petrobras.) So far, however, no accusations or evidence emerged against Rousseff. In fact, she does not even seem to be a major target of investigators, who seem to be zeroing in on Lula (and his immediate family.) The piece of accusation justifying the opening of impeachment proceedings relies on the use of accounting artifices to violate the constraints on public expenditure imposed by the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which a majority of opinion makers seem to consider too weak a case to sustain an impeachment. What makes the whole process more menacing is in fact her acute political fragility. Rousseff is universally seen as Lula’s creation, but never really relinquished his power over the party and the coalition it led.

Soon after Rousseff was reelected in November 2014, she announced a radical change of orientation in her administration’s economic policies. Austerity policies, cutting expenditures and raising taxes, seemed to be unavoidable in the face of the increased federal expenditure made to ensure her victory in the presidential elections.

The incumbent president repeatedly stated during the campaign that she rejected those policies, only to announce their implementation a few days after the result of the popular vote became known. Despite the apparent support of Lula, the change in orientation was badly received by the official Workers Party (PT), which grudgingly announced support for her, but conditioning it to a change in macroeconomic policies.

The party seemed to ignore the fact that during 2014, the increase in fiscal deficits failed to have any expansionary impact on the economy, which did not grow at all. The perception that the president had no political support of her own, however, stimulated her adversaries to aggressively advance proposals for her impeachment, based on whatever reason one could find, or the annulment of the election itself, or if nothing else worked, to force her to resign. With an aggressive opposition and unable to count on a supporting political base, the government was paralyzed for the whole year.

No relevant austerity measure has obtained Congress’ approval. Despite the effort of leftist parties to blame the pro-austerity Finance Minister Joaquim Levy for the contraction of the economy, it is impossible to ignore the fact that the failed attempts to get the proposed policies approved by Congress just made explicit the lack of political power that characterized Rousseff’s position. The impasse created by the inexistence of an effective government in the face of an aggressive opposition led decision-makers to postpone any but the most immediate decisions. Investment has fallen, workers have been fired in increasing numbers, consumption has been negatively impacted, etc.

The political crisis has transformed an expected recession into something that threatens to become a major depression, both in depth and duration. The situation is made more difficult by the difficulty to visualize any sustainable solution for the crises in the mediate horizon, let alone the coming months. If the impeachment process prospers, one could expect for sure increased political instability as a result, on the one hand, of attempts by PT and the social movements that are close to it to react somehow, and, on the other, by the fact that there is no organized opposition ready to take the place of the current administration. If the impeachment initiative is defeated, the problem remains that the president does not have any vision or power and it is overwhelmingly difficult to imagine how she could recover enough initiative to last the three remaining years of her term in office.

Paraphrasing the late historian Eric Hobsbawn, who observed that the Twentieth Century had been very short (beginning in 1914 and ending in 1991), 2015 may be a long year for Brazilians. The incompressible minimal duration of an impeachment process will take it to 2016, when the social situation may be more tense than it is now, with high inflation and increasing unemployment. If a national agreement of some sort, be it in terms of allowing Rousseff’s government to work or by removing it altogether, is not reached to avoid the worse, 2015 can last even longer. The country may dive into an unknown abyss of a combination of economic, political and social crises of which it is hard to see how, when and in what conditions it will recover.

(End)

Excerpt:

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff next to advisers with worried faces, after addressing the media, shortly after the announcement of the impeachment trial. Credit: Lula Marques/ Agência PT

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 3 2015 (IPS)

The aim to impeach President Dilma Rousseff is no longer merely a threat that was poisoning politics in Brazil. Now it may be a traumatic battle, but in the light of day.

On Wednesday, Dec. 2 the speaker of the lower house, Eduardo Cunha, gave the go-ahead to impeachment proceedings to remove Rousseff from office. The motion was introduced by three jurists, including Helio Bicudo, a co-founder of the governing Workers Party (PT), and Miguel Reale Junior, a former justice minister.

Cunha announced his decision shortly after it came out that the PT would vote against him in the lower house ethics council, which is investigating the money he has in Swiss bank accounts, presumably the product of graft and embezzlement in the state oil company, Petrobras – a scandal that has already affected 170 politicians and businesspersons.“The game has changed, there is another chess board now, with some light shining, after months of uncertainty. An impeachment process triggers radical positions not only in Congress, but in society at large. But the hope is that the game will be more transparent, with all the cards out on the table.” -- Fernando Lattman-Weltman

This confirms what the media has been commenting on, but which has not been publicly acknowledged by those involved: that there was a tacit agreement between the presidency and Cunha, which previously stood in the way of legal proceedings that could lead to the removal of Rousseff and Cunha.

Behind the “embrace” between the president and the speaker, both of whom faced the threat of legal action, was Cunha’s opposition to the government, even though he is a member of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, the PT’s chief ally in the governing coalition.

The PT has three seats in the 21-member ethics council. Its votes are considered decisive in the case of Cunha, who as speaker of the lower house has the authority to accept or dismiss requests for impeachment of the president.

The three PT members on the council opted to align themselves with the leadership of their party and with public opinion, which is overwhelmingly opposed to Cunha, resisting the pressure from the presidency, which is more concerned about keeping the president in office and cobbling together enough votes to push through the legislative measures needed to help the economy recover from the current crisis.

“The game has changed, there is another chess board now, with some light shining, after months of uncertainty,” said Fernando Lattman-Weltman, a professor of political science at the Rio de Janeiro State University.

“An impeachment process triggers radical positions not only in Congress, but in society at large,” he told IPS. “But the hope is that the game will be more transparent, with all the cards out on the table.”

The analyst said “Cunha is finished, he won’t survive any longer now that he played his last card; he relinquished the weapon of blackmail” – the impeachment of Rousseff that he had been delaying.

The speaker of the lower house, controversial since he was named in February, has been accused of violating “parliamentary decorum” by lying in March when he testified in the committee investigating the Petrobras corruption scandal, claiming he did not have bank accounts abroad.

But the Swiss attorney general’s office refuted his claim several months later, and sent documents about his accounts to prosecutors in Brazil.

Eduardo Cunha, speaker of the lower house of Congress in Brazil, announcing his decision to allow the impeachment trial to go ahead against President Dilma Rousseff. Credit: Alex Ferreira/Cámara de Diputados

Cunha had already been accused of taking bribes from companies that were rewarded lucrative Petrobras contracts, in the testimony given by four people facing prosecution in the scandal, who decided to cooperate with the justice system, revealing what they knew in order to reduce their possible sentences.

This means it is unlikely that he will hold on to his seat in Congress. He will lose it if the ethics council rules that he violated parliamentary decorum and if a majority of the 513 lawmakers in the lower house vote in favour of that accusation.

But his downfall would take several months.

Moreover, he and dozens of other legislators under investigation could go to prison, but only with authorisation by the Supreme Court – the only legal body that can decide whether members of the executive and legislative branches should be tried.

The impeachment trial against Rousseff is more uncertain, according to Lattman-Weltman. The most likely outcome is that the president “will manage to overcome the challenge, after a tough battle with the opposition, and depending on how society reacts.”

The removal of a president in Brazil requires a two-thirds majority in the lower house to authorise the impeachment trial, which is held by the Senate, where a two-thirds majority is also needed to find the accused guilty.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s political fate will be decided in the next few months in this emblematic building in Brasilia, the seat of the national Congress. Credit: Brazilian Congress

It is a lengthy process, because it begins in a committee of legislators from all parties, represented in proportion to each party’s number of seats in the house. In this case, Rousseff is accused of violating Brazil’s fiscal responsibility law by signing decrees that increased public spending without authorisation from the legislature. The president denies any wrongdoing.

Impeachment requires that a concrete crime be committed during the president’s current term. But it is a political trial, based on criteria that differ from legal trials. Former president Fernando Collor de Mello was found guilty in 1992 by the Senate, which barred him from holding public office for eight years, even though the Supreme Court failed to find sufficient grounds to convict him for corruption.

One serious effect of the new political dispute is its impact on the economy, in recession since 2014, which many now describe as depression. GDP was 4.5 percentage points lower in the third quarter of this year than in the same period last year. Economists forecast a slight recovery in 2017.

With unemployment standing at 7.9 percent in October against 4.7 percent in the same month in 2014, and annual inflation at 10 percent, Brazil is suffering one of its worst crises in history. The political chaos is making the situation even worse, by standing in the way of the adoption of necessary measures and generating uncertainty that has led to a reduction in investment, consumption and credit.

To make matters worse, there was a threat of a paralysis of government this month, due to failure to meet the budget’s fiscal deficit target. But the government managed to get approval Wednesday to change this year’s fiscal target, allowing it to end the year with a primary deficit of 31 billion dollars, which eased the tension.

Without that it would be necessary to cut all public expenditure, including water and energy in public buildings and travel by the president herself, such as her trip to the swearing-in ceremony of Argentine president-elect Mauricio Macri on Dec. 10.

It was a triumph by the government, which won approval of several economic measures in the last few weeks, after suffering numerous defeats this year, especially in the lower house, where the speaker has a strong influence.

“Cunha’s leadership is hollow, he no longer has power or legitimacy to demand loyalty from his allies,” said Antonio Augusto de Queiroz, director of documentation of the Inter-Parliamentary Advisory Department.

Given the political bickering and the government’s difficulties, legislators “are responding to pressure from society and from economic players, on the argument that the political crisis must not paralyse the country,” he told IPS.

“All politicians are worried” about the scandal unleashed by Operação Lava Jato or Operation Car Wash, the investigation by prosecutors and police of the fraud and corruption scheme designed to embezzle assets from Petrobras, especially since the Nov. 25 arrest of Delcidio do Amaral, the leader of the PT in the Senate.

Recent laws, such as the one to combat organised crime and money laundering, gave “unprecedented power and instruments enabling them to take action” to oversight and law enforcement bodies like the prosecutor’s office, the federal police and the courts of auditors, “combating the culture of secrecy and strengthening transparency,” with positive effects for politics, said Queiroz.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Excerpt:

By Fernando J. Cardim de Carvalho
RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 1 2015 (IPS)

Even moderately well-informed analysts knew that the Brazilian economy was in dire straits as President Dilma Rousseff initiated her second term in office in January.

Unlike her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011), Rousseff had not the same luck with the situation of the international economy. But also, unlike Lula, Rousseff showed herself a poor saleswoman for Brazilian goods and an even poorer manager of domestic economic policy.

Fernando Cardim de Carvalho

There was a strong suspicion that economic policy, especially in the last two years of her first term, had been conducted in ad hoc ways and that serious adjustments would be needed to steer the economy back to working condition anyway. Still, the situation seemed to be even worse than most analysts feared.

More surprising, however, is to find out that Brazilian politics is also in dire straits. Caught off guard by the Petrobras corruption scandal, federal authorities, beginning with Rousseff herself, seemed to become paralysed by the rapid fall in public support, completely losing the power of initiative and creating a dangerous political vacuum in the country.

It is a vacuum rather than a political threat because the opposition seems to be as lost as the president. The political right, never very fond of democratic institutions any way, seemed to be more interested in making the president “bleed” – as stated by Senator (and former vice-presidential candidate) Aloysio Nunes Ferreira, of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party – than with fighting for political hegemony.

Economic problems were certainly fostered by the quality of economic policy-making in the second half of Rousseff’s first term. The realisation that tailwinds created by the Chinese demand for raw materials were no longer blowing led the government to implement a series of measures to stimulate the economy that turned out to be largely useless.

It was not “heterodoxy” that characterised the policy, it was uninformed wishful thinking. A plethora of measures were taken in isolation, without any apparent unifying strategy behind them, distributed mostly as “gifts” from the federal government (which later contributed to the public perception that corruption became a system of government). “Brazil is living through a very dangerous period right now. Neither the government, nor the parliamentary opposition are led by leaders the population trusts”

Plagued by semi-structural exchange rate problems, whereby Brazilian producers lose competitiveness in the face of imported goods in domestic markets and of other sellers in international markets, the federal administration tried to deal with them piecemeal, mostly through instruments like tax reductions or changes in tax rates.

Obsessed with car production, the government burned resources trying to stimulate production (only to meet increasing resistance of other countries to import them, most notably Argentina), again without any strategy thinking about how these newly-produced automobiles would be used in polluted and traffic-jammed Brazilian cities.

The federal government was not deficient only in terms of strategic thinking but also in terms of home caretaking: all available evidence points to the high probability that tax reductions and other similar measures were decided without any calculation of costs, lost fiscal revenues, and so on.

Anti-cyclical macroeconomic policy in late 2008 relied to a large extent on the expansion of consumption expenditures fuelled by increasing household indebtedness. The increase in non-performing loans and income stagnation made this option more and more unsustainable. Investment, in contrast, public and private, repeatedly frustrated expectations.

Unable to finance badly needed infrastructure investments, the government showed itself to be extraordinarily slow in devising appropriate strategies to attract private investors to implement them. Apparently lost in their own inability to define a way out of the mess, the government “muddled through” situations where more forceful definitions were required, as was the case of electric power.

The list of failures or of situations where the government showed inability to lead is long and well known. What was surprising to some extent was to find out that all evidence suggests that the government itself was unaware of what was going on.

Winning re-election by a narrow margin, President Rousseff, characteristically after a long period of hesitation, decided to take a 180-degree turn, asking a known orthodox and fiscal conservative economist to head an empowered Ministry of Finance, surprising even her supporters who seemed to be perplexed by the need to defend policies that they hotly denounced when presented by opposition politicians.

This picture would be difficult enough to manage without the Petrobras scandal. But Petrobras is not only the largest company in the country, it is practically a symbol of the nationality. Besides, energy was supposed to be Rousseff’s area of expertise and she was in fact responsible for the company’s policies for a while, as Minister of Mines and Power.

An increasingly loud murmur of a possible impeachment of the president led her to equivocal political decisions, beginning with the definition of her cabinet, widely considered to be particularly low quality, and alienating not only her major party in government, the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, but even the majority of her own Workers’ Party.

The result of such initiatives was illustrated by the twin public demonstrations of Mar. 13 and 15.

On Mar. 13, nominal supporters of Rousseff marched through the streets of most of the largest cities in the country. Speaking to the press, most of the leaders of the march (Lula did not participate) declared conditional support for Rousseff – that is, conditional on the firing of the Minister of Finance and change of newly announced austerity policies.

On Mar. 15, an even larger crowd marched in the same cities declaring unconditional opposition to the president.

Brazil is living through a very dangerous period right now. Neither the government, nor the parliamentary opposition are led by leaders the population trusts. The president is slow and generally equivocal when making fateful decisions. The right-wing opposition seemed to be more interested in enjoying the possibility of enacting a “third” ballot to obtain at least a moral condemnation of the president.

This would be bad enough for a country that has just celebrated thirty years of civilian government. When the economy adds its own heavy problems to the political vacuum, it is impossible not to fear the future. (END/IPS COLUMNIST  SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt: