ROUSSEFF’S OUSTER DRAWS NEARER
Once a long shot, impeachment looks inevitable
•Whena measure to impeach Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was introduced to Congress late last year, the possibility that she would actually be removed from office seemed remote.
The charges against her were obscure, not the variety that spurs outrage: She is alleged to have broken fiscal rules in her handling of the federal budget to hide deficits and bolster an embattled government. The allegations also came with a good dose of irony: Her main opponents in Congress are accused of crimes much worse.
Yet, what started as a longshot bid has gained momentum. Late Tuesday the Senate was preparing to vote Wednesday on whether to put her on trial and many analysts consider Rousseff’s ouster all but a foregone conclusion.
“Dilma will be impeached for a variety of reasons,” said Marcos Troyjo, a professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. “And the possibility of her coming back is zero.”
Rousseff has repeatedly called the impeachment drive a “coup” because she has not been charged with a crime. She argues that previous presidents used similar accounting practices.
Despite being the legal basis for the case against her, however, impeachment has turned into a referendum on Rousseff’s leadership. Brazil is beset by a bevy of corruption scandals connected to her Worker’s Party and is struggling with its worst recession since the 1930s. The president also is criticized for an inability to negotiate with other politicians in a country where personal relationships are paramount.
Rousseff, a former Marxist guerrilla group member who became an establishment insider, rode the coattails of her once wildly popular mentor and predecessor as president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, to win the presidency in 2010. In 2014 she was re-elected with 51 per cent of the vote.
But at the same time that prices for commodities that are the lifeblood of Brazil’s emerging economy started tumbling, investigators began uncovering a multibillion-dollar kickback scheme at Petrobras, the state oil company. Worst of all for Rousseff, many of the people implicated are top officials in her party.