Rousseff Closer to Impeachement in Brazil

HAVANA TIMES — Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has a thorny uphill battle ahead in the Senate to avoid being burned at the stake of “impeachment”, notes Ana Maria Pomi of dpa news.

According to detractors and allies, it was the 68-year-old president herself who put up some of the stones that made her second government, which began in 2015, into a Via Crucis.

With a character incompatible with the diplomacy necessary to grease the relations between the executive and legislative branches, her reluctance to sit down and negotiate, even some flashes of pride, allowed the support with which she was reelected in 2014 to evaporate: a nine-party coalition totaling 306 deputies.

Of these 306 deputies, only 137 voted on Sunday against her being put on trial, approved with 367 votes in favor in the lower chamber. It still needs ratification in the Senate.

Her own supporters in the Workers Party (PT), and especially her political mentor, former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, have criticized ad nauseum a lack of good politics by  Rousseff, and have been blamed her for the dramatic events that are unfolding.

Gerson Camaroti, an analyst on Globo News, revealed today that the PT blames Rousseff for the resounding defeat in the Lower House, and attributed it to retaliation from allies for the way they were treated in five years and four months of her government.

“It was a mistake to have left politics in the background for so long,” admitted an adviser to the president. “When we realized, it was too late,” he lamented.

Reviews are not restricted to aspects of her character. Both the PT and the social and trade union movements, historical support of the leftwing PT, have lambasted the government’s economic policy, which, to make matters worse, plunged the country into a historic recession.

In an attempt to show a long lost fiscal balance, the president committed accounting maneuvers which gave rise to the call for her “impeachment”, noted dpa.

But the legislature also bears a share of the blame for economic ruin. As part of the “cold war” with the executive, parliament blocked all proposals aimed to balance the state accounting, which is still in the red.

And more. In what was called an “agenda bomb”, the president of the lower house, Eduardo Cunha, of the same party as Vice President Michel Temer, the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), and a declared enemy of Rousseff, worked to increase the fiscal deficit, approving increasing wages for the public sector and boycotting an increase or creation of taxes.

The name of the parliamentary rebellion is Eduardo Cunha. The evangelical and conservative politician led what would be the first defeat suffered Rousseff in Parliament.

It was on February 1, 2015, one month into Rousseff’s second term, that Cunha, preaching “independence from the executive,” won a landslide in the race for the presidency of the House of Deputies over the PT candidate, Arlindo Chinaglia.

Since then, the politician who faces two indictments before the Supreme Court for corruption offenses linked to the Petrobras case, was a tough and ferocious opponent.

The death blow came in December, when he took on the request of “impeachment” of Rousseff hours after the PT gave its endorsement to the opening of a proceeding against Cunha before the Board of Ethics of the House, on suspicion of holding Swiss bank accounts with money diverted from Petrobras.

After a disastrous 2015, Rousseff began 2016 estranged from Temer, her vice president, who would be the leading beneficiary of her eventual downfall, and who last month supported his party abandoning the ruling coalition.

Rousseff, the tireless fighter, former political prisoner who knows battles, both in the trenches of the guerrilla as in a clinic where she overcame lymphatic cancer, said days ago that she will “never” resign.

However, a resignation allowing for a call for early presidential elections could be a way out for the PT and Lula.