President Dilma Rousseff claims to detect a glimmer at the end of the tunnel in Brazil’s political crisis, but what she really may be seeing, analysts say, are the headlights of an oncoming train. “Less than a year into her second term, Rousseff faces an economy in steep recession, a corruption scandal engulfing much of the elite, and personal popularity ratings of just 10 percent”.
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On Wednesday, she placed on a courageous face to announce that she noticed “mild on the finish of the tunnel”.
It is the first time the TCU has made such a ruling against the country’s president in almost 80 years and follows a judgement on Tuesday that cleared the way for a separate investigation into alleged irregularities in Ms. Rousseff’s re-election campaign last year to be resumed.
The court said that her government’s accounting practices in 2014, including taking what amounted to unauthorised loans from state-owned banks to make up for budget shortfalls, broke the law.
In the ruling on Tuesday, Brazil’s top electoral authority said there were grounds to investigate her re-election campaign, including the suspicion of illegal funding from kickbacks involving oil firm Petrobras.
Congress put off for a fourth time a session on whether to back or overturn her vetoes of two spending bills after her government was unable to gather enough lawmakers for a quorum despite a cabinet reshuffle last week meant to bolster her support. However, that is a distant prospect.
The most immediate challenge comes from Wednesday’s ruling by Brazil’s top audit court that the government manipulated its 2014 accounts. If the federal government is defeated at every step, impeachment proceedings could possibly be launched.
That could still take months. However, Brazil’s Congress, seething with shifting loyalties, is just not pleasant territory for Rousseff.
The only good news Rousseff has had recently was the confirmation by Swiss authorities that her declared enemy in Congress, lower house speaker Eduardo Cunha, holds bank accounts in Switzerland, which he had denied.
A weakness of the pro-impeachment lobby has been that it had little to go on, beyond popular dissatisfaction over Rousseff.
However, the government rejects the possibility that the TCU’s ruling creates the conditions for impeachment.
Rousseff’s main rival in last year’s elections, Senator Aécio Neves, who leads the main opposition Brazilian Social Democracy Party, or PSDB, said the ruling was “historic” and had “proved” the president had committed impeachable crimes.
“I think about it’s going to set off a extra intense effort to go ahead with President Dilma’s impeachment”.
The government tried desperately to delay the vote as the ruling provides legal grounds to request a president’s impeachment.
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But Gabriel Petrus, a political analyst at Barral M Jorge consultants, says that “she nonetheless has a few leverage” as a result of the lengthy, winding procedures would give her a number of alternatives to strike offers.
