BRASÍLIA: The impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff should go ahead, the representative for a congressional commission said Wednesday, bringing the country's political crisis a step closer to a showdown.
Jovair Arantes, rapporteur for a special impeachment commission in the lower house of Congress, said he had concluded the "legal admissibility" of the case against the leftist president.
The decision was given in a lengthy report that Arantes read aloud, live on national television, to the 65-member impeachment commission, sometimes interrupted by deputies shouting and arguing.
Although Arantes' decision was non-binding and mostly of symbolic value, it meant the opposition drew first blood just as an increasingly bitter battle to remove Brazil's first woman president from office gathers pace.
On Monday, the full commission will vote its recommendation. Then on April 18 the lower house of Congress meets to hold a decisive vote on whether the impeachment will go ahead.
"Today's vote was expected," said Mendonca Filho, a deputy from the conservative, pro-impeachment Democratas party. "Now we have to find out the position of the whole commission... and then we move on to the main battle in the full chamber."
Rousseff is accused of presiding over large-scale fiddling of government accounts to mask the depth of budgetary shortfalls during her reelection in 2014.
The president -- highly unpopular because of a severe recession and a giant corruption scandal enveloping Brazil's political elite -- says she has committed no impeachment-worthy crime and claims she is the victim of a coup attempt.
- Blow, counter blow -
Intrigue is rife about which way Congress will lean on the 18th.
The lower chamber's mood swings almost daily, with Rousseff sometimes appearing to have run out of allies before winning an unexpected boost.
Rousseff's ruling coalition took a huge hit last week when the PMDB party, headed by Temer, went into opposition. Her Workers' Party is now scrambling with the help of smaller allies to build a new alliance.
Rousseff's powerful predecessor and mentor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, is holed up in a hotel in the capital Brasilia leading negotiations with parties and individual deputies.
The key bargaining chip still left in Rousseff's hands are ministerial posts and hundreds of other government jobs, including seven ministries and some 600 jobs that had been given previously to the PMDB.
On Tuesday, the murky political landscape entered extraordinary new territory when a Supreme Court judge ruled in favor of a bid to also impeach the vice president, Michel Temer, who has become a leading opponent of Rousseff -- and would replace her if she had to step down.
In the impeachment request, Temer is accused of participating in the same fiscal juggling as Rousseff.
Although proceedings against Temer are highly unlikely to get underway soon and could still be thrown out by the full Supreme Court, the judge's ruling weakened the opposition camp.
However on Wednesday, Rousseff suffered a new blow when the powerful agricultural industry federation, the CNA, urged her to leave office, saying the government "does not recognize or understand the real nature of the problems facing the country."
- Number crunching -
Rousseff, 68, needs at least 172 votes against impeachment or abstentions in the lower house. The opposition needs two thirds of the chamber to vote in favor, or 342 out of the total 513.
The PMDB defection stripped her of important votes, but so far she has apparently kept hold of other important parts of her coalition, notably most of the Progressive Party, known as the PP.
If the motion passes, then an impeachment trial starts in the Senate, ending with another vote in which the upper house would need a two-thirds majority to remove Rousseff from office.
Brazilians are angry at Rousseff, whose government approval ratings hover at around 10 percent, and also at many in the opposition like Temer.
While Rousseff fights the allegations about budgetary manipulations, many in her Workers' Party, but also in the opposition, have been embroiled in a massive bribes-and-embezzlement scandal centered on state oil company Petrobras.
Temer has been linked to the scandal though is not facing charges, while the lower house speaker and key man in the impeachment movement, Eduardo Cunha, has been charged with stashing millions of dollars in bribes in Switzerland.
Lula has also been charged in a Petrobras-related case.
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