Brazil in turmoil – An attack on democracy

BRAZIL’S upper house of Parliament, the Federal Senate, voted last Thursday 55 to 22 in favour of impeaching Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff.

It follows a vote of 367 to 146 also for impeachment in the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, on 17 April 2016.

She is now suspended for 180 days while a full parliamentary investigation takes place and the Vice-President Michel Temer takes over. Another vote will then be held in the Senate. If two-thirds of the senators vote for impeachment, then Rousseff is formally removed as President; if the threshold is not reached she is reinstated.

Sounds straightforward and reasonable?

It’s not.

Dilma – leader of Brazil’s centre-Left Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores – PT) and a former Marxist guerrilla who was imprisoned by Brazil’s right-wing dictatorship and tortured in the 1970s – was re-elected as Brazil’s President on 5 October 2014. It was the fourth time in a row that PT won the Presidential elections. Very soon after the elections, the right-wing in Brazil, increasingly frustrated with their inability to remove PT from office in democratic elections, decided to instead focus on impeaching Dilma.

Parallel to these developments there was a huge federal police investigation called Operação Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash) into political corruption and the misappropriation of public money generated by the semi-state Brazilian oil company, Petrobras. This investigation has snowballed into the largest of its kind in Brazil and has implicated a significant number of present and former members of Parliament from all political parties.

Rousseff herself, however, has never been personally implicated for benefiting from corruption. She is largely seen as one of the few honest politicians in Brazil and her impeachment is grounded on something entirely different.

She stands accused of window-dressing Government accounts with a temporary transfer of money from state banks. She has admitted she had done this but that so has every Government before her and that it is a common occurrence. Crucially, it is not a so-called “crime of responsibility”, which is what is required for the impeachment of the President, and no other President has been impeached for this.

Additionally, due to a variety of internal and external factors, Brazil is facing its worst economic recession in 25 years and Rousseff has seen a sharp decline in her public support.

The right-wing, elite-owned media in Brazil (which completely dominates the media landscape) has worked with the opposition to help link these three separate issues in the public consensus.

Therefore, when the Houses of Parliament were voting to impeach Rousseff many were openly stating that it was due to Brazil’s current economic woes or Rousseff’s shortcomings – very few actually discussed the legal case for the impeachment before casting their vote. In fact, one far-Right deputy, Jair Bolsonaro, dedicated his vote to the military colonel who headed up the notorious torture unit during the dictatorship era. His son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, who is also a deputy, praised the military general responsible for the military coup in 1964 before he voted.

It’s clear that the impeachment is political and lacking a legal basis.

Furthermore, of the 513 deputies and 81 senators in the Brazilian Congress, 318 are under investigation or face charges for criminal acts, fraud and/or corruption. Yet they have the sole power to impeach a President who won a democratic election 19 months ago.

The impeachment is not a simple vote of “no confidence” and it does not mean that new elections will be held, even if Rousseff is formally removed as President after the Senate votes in 180 days

Instead, the Vice-President Michel Temer of the centre-Right PMDB party, takes over as President. He will be able to appoint a new 21-person Cabinet, fully control the national budget, and oversee the appointment of up to 10,000 key Government jobs. He has stated that if Rousseff is formally removed in 180 days and he is formally established as President he will see out her term, which ends in December 2018, and he will not call fresh elections.

So Temer will be taking the highest political office in Brazil despite the fact that not one person in the country voted for him to take on this role and he will see out Rousseff’s term, even though 54million people voted to re-elect Rousseff as President in October 2014.

Temer himself has also been accused in the Lava Jata investigation of receiving $1.5million in kickbacks. It is widely believed that he will use the Presidential position to shield himself from prosecution.

As a sign of things to come and who Temer’s presidency will favour in a country which is deeply affected by racism and sexism that the 21-person Cabinet that he has now put in place is made of 21 white men. This is despite the fact the fact that the last census found that over 51% of Brazilians are female and 50.7% of Brazilians now define themselves as black or mixed race.

It is also clear that Temer and his Cabinet will implement disastrous neo-liberal economic policies and they will hack away at the vital social programmes that PT have implemented and funded under Rousseff and predecessor Lula’s Presidency.

Temer, who has a court ruling barring him from running for office for eight years because he violated campaign spending laws, will do all of this without a democratic mandate but he will have the support of Brazil’s powerful media and elite.