The speaker of Brazil’s lower house of Congress, announced Wednesday that he has authorized impeachment proceedings into Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.
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“This will be a sort of plebiscite in the country”, Senator Jose Serra, of the main opposition PSDB party, said of the impeachment efforts.
Loyalists began rallying support for Rousseff on Thursday morning, as communications minister Ricardo Berzoini called a meeting of party leaders from the ruling coalition to ensure that they have sufficient support to kill the impeachment move in the lower house.
Rousseff, who took office in 2011 and won re-election a year ago, is expected to survive the proceedings because her party and allies appear to control enough seats to ultimately defeat those who support impeachment. The move threatens to paralyze Rousseff’s economic agenda as she focuses on saving her political life rather than reviving growth.
Cunha accepted a request filed by the opposition to impeach the president on grounds that she tampered with the 2014 fiscal accounts, breaching Brazil’s fiscal responsibility law.
There are accusations, including from the country’s top audit court, that the president authorized backpedaling to ensure social spending was maintained ahead of last year’s presidential elections, and that the practice has continued into 2015.
The motion – which took more than an hour to be read – claimed that Rousseff was guilty of fiscal wrongdoing because she manipulated government accounts to the tune of 2.5bn reais ($668m).
“I’ve committed no illicit act, there is no suspicion hanging over me of any misuse of public money”, Rousseff said in a nationally televised statement. He now faces being stripped by the lower house ethics committee of his speaker’s post. He is accused of siphoning some $40 million from Petrobras to himself and other members of Congress. Shortly after denying before the congressional commission investigating the Petrobras scandal that he had any overseas bank accounts, it was established that he has millions in undeclared funds stashed away in Switzerland.
Brazil’s political establishment is already close to paralysis due to an investigation into a massive graft scandal at state-run oil company Petrobras.
A special committee with members from all parties will decide on the merits of the request, which needs two-thirds, or 342, of the votes in the lower house. That vote was originally scheduled for Monday, but has now been put back to next Tuesday.
“I received with indignation the decision of the president of the House of Representatives to process the request for impeachment against the democratic mandate conferred on me by the Brazilian people”, she said. “Everyone in Brazil must obey the law, particularly the President”, he wrote.
On several occasions over the past few months, tens of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets of cities across Brazil to demand the impeachment of the President.
“Public pressure for impeachment could make the PT pull the rug out from underneath her feet and pressure Rousseff to quit, perhaps by feigning ill health, before too much damage is done to the party”, he added.
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“It’s going to start to get interesting”, said Siobhan Morden, head of Latin America fixed-income strategy at Nomura Holdings Inc. “I used to believe impeachment would be too hard, but from what I’ve been hearing from congress, it now seems there is a possibility”.
