As Slate’s Franklin Foerput it in a long article on Brazil yesterday: “Dilma’s impeachment was a farce, if only for the fact that her accusers have benefited from graft on a mind-bending scale and ginned up the spectacle to distract from their own misdeeds”.
Advertisement
Michel Temer, who was serving as vice president but received a promotion to president upon Rousseff’s suspension, will serve as president until the Brazilian presidential elections in 2018 if Rousseff is removed from power. Mr. Temer has sought to turn Brazil’s politics sharply to the right.
Temer, who is also under investigation for corruption, was severely criticized for initially appointing an all white male Cabinet.
The vote in the upper house of the national Congress in Brasilia cast a bright and unwelcome spotlight on the country’s political turmoil at the very time that it is trying to put on its best face for the Summer Olympics under way in Rio de Janeiro. “And that always comes with a reaction”.
The Senate, after a 20-hour session, voted 59-21 to accept charges Rousseff manipulated budget figures ahead of her re-election in 2014.
Her mentor, former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, is also facing legal troubles. And she and her supporters charge the opposition with mounting a “coup” against her, in the tradition of the military junta she once worked to subvert as a member of the underground resistance.
Rousseff, 68, has likened the impeachment drive to a putsch by her political enemies.
Others in the worldwide left have voiced similar sentiments.
Temer also hopes to be confirmed as president in time to attend the summit of the G20 group of leading world economies in China on September 4, Freitas told Reuters.
“To apply pressure and keep the Senate alert to the fact that we will continue denouncing that it was not a crime of responsibility and that the goal of this present government is to attack labour rights, social rights etc”, said one man. “The United States can not sit silently while the democratic institutions of one of our most important allies are undermined”. Two-thirds of the Senate must vote in favour for Ms Rousseff’s conviction to stand.
“The cards are marked in this game”, said Worker’s Party Sen. “There is no trial, just a sentence that has already been written”, said Workers Party senator Jorge Viana in a speech to the chamber, according to Reuters.
Advertisement
The Senate suspended Rousseff, the South American nation’s first female president, on May 12 over accusations of illegal accounting practices and fiddling the budget to mask a slumping economy. Please see our terms of service for more information. A plunging economy cut deeply at the public’s estimation of her in ensuing years. Against her, he said, “there is a political alliance that smells of a coup”.
