BRASILIA, Brazil — Senators in Brazil began debate Wednesday on whether to oust President Dilma Rousseff, a movement that has built up steam and turned into a referendum on her leadership amid several spiraling crises besetting Latin America’s largest nation.
If a simple majority of the 81 senators vote in favor, Rousseff will be suspended from office and Vice President Michel Temer will take over for up to six months pending a decision on whether to remove her from office permanently.
Senate President Renan Calheiros said he wants the vote to take place on Wednesday night and impeachment appeared to be foregone conclusion among the 81 senators, their aides and the scrum of journalists packed into the Congress for the historic session.
Major newspapers have tallied at least 50 likely votes in favor of the impeachment and pro-impeachment senators told journalists they expect as many as 60 votes. Such a result would send a strong signal that Rousseff’s chances of emerging victorious from the trial and reassuming her mandate, which ends in December, 2018, are slim.
The impeachment stems from allegations Rousseff broke fiscal laws, but she vehemently denies the charges, saying that such financial maneuvers had been used by two prior presidents without repercussions.
But with the once-booming economy now mired in the worst recession in decades and a sprawling graft probe exposing the shocking extent of corruption among the country’s political class and top businessmen, the impeachment vote has also become something of referendum on Rousseff and her government.
When the impeachment was first floated just over a year ago, it seemed a remote possibility. But as its main champion, House Speaker Eduardo Cunha, pushed the process implacably forward, it gained momentum and now appears unstoppable.
Senator Magno Malta said Brazil’s future in the balance.
“To improve the life of the nation we need to remove them (Rousseff’s Workers’ Party) at this time,” Malta told a scrum of journalists gathered outside the Senate floor. “We will start to breathe again and the doctor will say the nation has given signs of life and will be stable soon.”
But it’s not clear that all of those voting to impeach Rousseff would also vote to convict her and remove her permanently from office. A tally by the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo suggests that so far only 41 senators are willing to remove Rousseff from office permanently — 13 short of the number needed.
The lower house of Congress voted 367-137 last month in favor of impeachment, an anti-Rousseff verdict so resounding that many Brazilians believe it will influence the Senate, where she has traditionally been seen to have more allies.
Rousseff, a former Marxist guerrilla group member who became an establishment insider, was the hand-picked successor to her once wildly popular mentor former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and handily won the race to succeed him in 2010. She rode his wave of popularity while the economy continued to prosper, but her approval ratings plummeted in step with the economy. She eked out a victory in the 2014 race, and was re-elected with 51 percent of the vote.
And just as prices for commodities that are the lifeblood of Brazil’s economy started tumbling, investigators began uncovering a multibillion-dollar kickback scheme at Petrobras, the state oil company.
The probe has led to the conviction of dozens of the country’s elite, from politicians to the former president of Odebrecht, a major construction firm.
While Rousseff hasn’t personally been accused of corruption, many Brazilians hold her accountable because much it prospered under her administrations and those of Silva. While those ensnared in the scandal come from across the political spectrum, many are top officials in Rousseff’s party.
Rousseff was chief of staff during Silva’s second term and before that she was minister of mines and energy, positions where she was in a position to know about the widespread graft at Petrobras, her critics say.
“The people involved abused and took advantage of the opportunity to steal money in an absurd way,” said Tiago Gomes da Silva, a 33-year-old standing in line at an unemployment office in Rio de Janeiro. “This had to come to an end. And the actual government is directly linked to this.”
As details of the corruption have emerged, the economy has continued downward. Gross domestic product is expected to contract 3.6 percent this year after an equally bad 2015. Both inflation and unemployment are around 10 percent and announcements of closures, from local factories to multinational chains like Wal-Mart, have become commonplace.
Mixed into it all has been Rousseff’s inability to work with others. She is known for bluntness and doesn’t have the charisma or back-slapping chumminess that analysts say is often necessary to build consensus and make deals.
“She is a woman with a knife in her boot,” said Alexandre Barros, a political consultant in Brasilia, using a popular phrase in Portuguese to describe tough women. “But she is not a politician.”
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