BRASILIA (Reuters) – Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff held last-minute negotiations with wavering lawmakers yesterday in an effort to secure crucial support the day before an impeachment vote that could lead to her removal from office.
The political crisis has divided the country and turned into a bitter clash between the leftist leader and her centrist Vice President Michel Temer, who would take over if she is unseated.
Rousseff cancelled an appearance at an anti-impeachment rally of union and left-wing social activists led by former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, her predecessor and founder of the ruling Workers’ Party.
Instead she met with lawmakers behind closed doors in a bid to obtain their vote or abstention today when the lower house of Congress votes on whether she should be impeached for breaking the country’s budget laws.
The talks indicated that today’s ballot may be tighter than expected as Rousseff seeks to swing the estimated two dozen additional votes she needs to prevent a two-thirds majority in favour of impeachment in the 513-seat lower chamber, which her opponents need to push ahead with this process.
A Temer aide said that Rousseff, with the help of Lula, who is still Brazil’s most influential politician despite a graft probe, had managed to reverse a “handful” of votes but not alter the growing momentum for impeachment.
In a rowdy marathon session of speeches that went through the night, opposition congressmen shouted: “Out with the Workers’ Party!” Rousseff’s supporters, meanwhile, called for the ouster of House Speaker Eduardo Cunha, her political archenemy who has sped up the impeachment process.
Rousseff is fighting to survive a political firestorm fuelled by Brazil’s worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s and a spiraling corruption scandal centered on state oil company Petrobras that has reached her inner circle.
The president’s opponents want her dismissed from office on charges that she manipulated budget accounts to boost public spending to boost her 2014 re-election. They also blame her for running Latin America’s largest economy into the ground.
In a video and a newspaper column, Rousseff – Brazil’s first female president – strongly denied she had committed an impeachable crime and called the bid to oust her “the biggest legal and political fraud” in the country’s history.
“We are facing the threat of a coup d’état, a coup without guns that uses more destructive methods like fraud and lies to try to destroy a legitimately elected government,” she wrote in yesterday’s edition of the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper.
Rousseff could become Brazil’s first president to be impeached since 1992 when Fernando Collor de Mello resigned just before imminent impeachment for corruption. The current crisis is far deeper because he had few supporters while Rousseff has the backing of working class Brazilians who have seen their quality of live improve during 13 years of Workers’ Party rule.
“If she loses and Temer takes over we will take to the streets, and we have the strength to stay there as long as necessary,” said Marco Antonio Baratto, coordinator of the MST landless peasants movement, at a rally of several thousand Rousseff supporters camped out in the parking lot of Brasilia’s football stadium.
A tired-looking Lula, the labour leader who led Brazil as president from 2003 to 2010, addressed the rally briefly with a hoarse voice and said he had to rush back to the talks with lawmakers.
Lula’s bodyguards scuffled with impeachment supporters who tried to block his motorcade returning to his hotel.
If her impeachment is approved by the lower house, the Senate must then vote on whether to go ahead with putting Rousseff on trial for disobeying budget laws. If she loses that vote, which would likely take place on May 10 or 11, Rousseff would automatically be suspended and replaced by Temer.
Temer, who would serve out Rousseff’s term until 2018 if she is found guilty by the Senate, has little popular support.
