Brazil's
lower house of Congress on Sunday voted to impeach the country’s
president, Dilma Rousseff, sending the removal process to the Senate.
In an act of unintended though rich symbolism, the House member who
pushed impeachment over the 342-vote threshold was Dep. Bruno Araújo,
himself implicated by a document indicating he may have received
illegal funds from the construction giant at the heart of the
nation’s corruption scandal. Even more significantly, Araújo
belongs to the center-right party PSDB, whose nominees have lost four
straight national elections to Rousseff’s moderate-left PT party,
with the last ballot-box defeat delivered just 18 months ago, when 54
million Brazilians voted to re-elect Dilma as president.
Those two
facts about Araújo underscore the unprecedentedly surreal nature of
yesterday’s proceedings in Brasília, capital of the world’s
fifth-largest country. Politicians and parties that have spent two
decades trying, and failing, to defeat PT in democratic elections
triumphantly marched forward to effectively overturn the 2014 vote by
removing Dilma on grounds that, as today’s New York Times report
makes clear, are, at best, dubious in the extreme. Even The
Economist, which has long despised the PT and its anti-poverty
programs and wants Dilma to resign, has argued that “in the
absence of proof of criminality, impeachment is unwarranted”
and “looks like a pretext for ousting an unpopular president.”
Sunday’s
proceedings, conducted in the name of combating corruption, were
presided over by one of the democratic world’s most blatantly
corrupt politicians, House speaker Eduardo Cunha (above, center), who
was recently discovered to have stashed millions of dollars in secret
Swiss bank accounts that have no possible non-corrupt source and who
lied under oath when he denied to Congressional investigators that he
had foreign bank accounts. Of the 594 members of the House, as the
Globe and Mail reported yesterday, “318 are under investigation
or face charges” while their target, President Rousseff,
“herself faces no allegation of financial impropriety.”
[...]
It is highly
likely that the Senate will agree to hear the charges, which will
result in the 180-day suspension of Dilma as president and the
installation of the pro-business Vice President Michel Temer from the
PMDB party. The vice president himself is, as the New York Times put
it, “under scrutiny over claims that he was involved in an illegal
ethanol purchasing scheme.” Temer recently made it known that one
of the leading candidates to head his economic team would be the
chairman of Goldman Sachs in Brazil, Paulo Leme.
If, after
trial, two-thirds of the Senate votes to convict, Dilma will be
permanently removed. Many suspect that one core objective in
impeaching Dilma is to provide a cathartic sense for the public that
corruption has been addressed, all designed to exploit Temer’s
newfound control to prevent further investigations of the dozens upon
dozens of actually corrupt politicians populating the leading
parties.
Full
report:
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