Political limbo after Brazil's lower house votes to impeach Rousseff
Latest update : 2016-04-18
Brazil’s 514-seat lower house voted by a 367-137 vote late Sunday in favour of impeaching Rousseff over allegations she hid and manipulated federal budgets during her 2014 re-election bid.
But the latest vote does not mean the 68-year-old Brazilian leader must relinquish power immediately. The Sunday night result triggers a long period of legal challenges and further political instability as the impeachment process goes up to the Senate and an appeals process.
According to Ligia Maura Costa, a Brazilian author and professor at Sciences Po university in Paris, the process could take until the end of the year until a final decision is reached and Brazil’s political future is secured ahead of the 2018 presidential election.
The latest vote to start impeachment proceedings came after the country’s largest political party, the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), and the Progressive Party abandoned the ruling coalition, stacking the odds in favour of an impeachment vote in parliament.
Following Sunday’s vote, Rousseff now has the option of appealing the lower house vote to the Supreme Court. If she does, the Senate has to await the court’s ruling before Brazil’s upper house can take up the vote to endorse the lower house decision. Until a court decision is made, Rousseff remains president.
The date for the Senate vote has not yet been fixed. But experts say the vote must be held before May 11.
If an overwhelming majority of the 81 members endorses the lower house vote to impeach the president, Rousseff will have to step down and Vice President Michel Temer will take over as Brazil’s interim leader.
Reporting from Rio de Janeiro, FRANCE 24’s Nicolas Ransom noted that the odds in the Senate were not stacked in favour of Rousseff’s Workers’ Party.
"It is important to note that the majority in the Senate is already in the opposition’s favour and the fate of the Brazilian president is extremely delicate,” said Ransom. “The Workers' Party, in power for 12 years, is stunned, and some party members have suggested that Rousseff should reduce the duration of her mandate and call for early presidential elections."
Rousseff has vigorously denied the accusations, calling the impeachment moves “a democratic coup”, and has vowed to fight the charges.
A rogue’s gallery of corrupt politicians
The accusations driving the impeachment process are centered on fiscal manipulation allegations on the 2014 campaign trail. In Brazil, the term employed for the fudging of public accounts is “pedaladas” – or tampering. It does not pertain to the massive Petrobas corruption scandal that has dominated Brazilian headlines over the past few months.
The massive money laundering scandal at the state-controlled oil company has triggered an investigation called Operation Car Wash – or “Lava Jato” in Portuguese – that has implicated a number of top Brazilian politicians, including former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Temer is also implicated in campaign budget fiscal manipulation charges, with an April 5 ruling by a Supreme Court judge that Congress must open impeachment proceedings against the deeply unpopular vice president and former PMDB party leader.
“If you read the impeachment procedure in both cases: the one that is still under vote against Dilma Rousseff and the one against the vice president that has not started yet, both do not actually mention the [Petrobas] corruption scandal. It’s much more based on fiscal rules that have not been complied with, that is lying or manipulating the budgetary accounts,” noted Maura Costa.
But the man leading Rousseff’s impeachment proceedings, lower house leaderEduardo Cunha, has been charged with corruption and money laundering in the Petrobas kickback scandal and faces an ethics inquiry over undeclared Swiss bank accounts. Cunha has featured among the top six heavyweight namesimplicated in the Panama Papers, or the trove of offshore financial dealings leaked to the press earlier this month.
A number of international organisations, including the Organization of American States (OAS), have voiced their disquiet over Rousseff’s impeachment process. "Here we have a person who has no investigation, no complaint, no indictment in any court and we find among those who will judge her in Congress people who have been accused, are under investigation and have cases pending," said OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro told reporters earlier this month.
Impeachers face impeachment
The massive corruption allegations come as Latin America’s biggest economy heads for one of its worst recessions ever. Growth shrank by 3.8 per cent in 2014 with the contraction set to continue. Unemployment remains high, with one in five Brazilians out of work, and budget deficits putting a cap on government stimulus spending.
Despite the economic woes, Brazil’s political impasse looks set to continue in the weeks and months to come.
If the Senate does approve the impeachment by an overwhelming 81 votes, a trial in the upper house – overseen by the Supreme Court president – can take up to 180 days. To remove her from office, two-thirds of the 81 senators, or 54, would have to vote for her ouster. Below that threshold, Rousseff would be reinstated as president.
If the trial results in an impeachment ruling, Rousseff can once again appeal the vote and has indicated that she would do so.
If Rousseff loses that appeal, Temer is supposed to serve out the rest of her term, which lasts until the end of 2018. But given that Temer himself could face impeachment proceedings, Brazil’s long, drawn-out period of instability and economic woes looks set to continue for a while.
Date created : 2016-04-18
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