BRASÍLIA: The head of Brazil's impeachment commission was to give his verdict Wednesday on whether President Dilma Rousseff should be ousted, raising the temperature another notch in a political crisis engulfing Latin America's biggest country.
Lawmaker Jovair Arantes, who presided over the cross-party congressional commission examining the fate of Brazil's first woman president, was to present his recommendation at 1700 GMT.
Arantes' decision is non-binding and mostly of symbolic value but will move the furious debate over Rousseff's impeachment a step closer to resolution.
His declaration precedes a vote by the full 65-member commission due Monday. The commission's vote will also be non-binding but will set the tone ahead of April 18, when the lower house of Congress holds its decisive vote on whether Rousseff should go.
She is accused of presiding over large-scale fiddling of government accounts to mask the depth of budgetary shortfalls during her reelection in 2014.
Rousseff -- highly unpopular because of a severe recession and a giant corruption scandal enveloping the political elite -- says she has committed no impeachment-worthy crime and claims she is the victim of a coup attempt.
- Shaky alliances -
Intrigue is rife over 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.
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.
Rousseff's ruling coalition collapsed 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 coalition.
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.
An announcement of new ministers had been expected any day, but on Tuesday Rousseff said she would hold off from deciding on a new government before the lower house makes its vote.
Newspaper O Globo reported that the president's camp decided on the delay out of fear that supposed new allies could still betray her when it came time to vote.
- 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.
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.
With loyalties shifting daily, predictions of the outcome in the lower house are highly unreliable.
However in the commission vote due on Monday, Globo published a survey Wednesday of the 65 members and found that 30 were in favor of impeachment, 18 were against and 17 undecided.
- Clean slate? -
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.
Rousseff's main political backer Lula has also been charged in a Petrobras-related case.
Against that backdrop, some in Brazil are calling for a complete change at the top.
Former minister and presidential candidate Marina Silva called for the speeding up of a separate Supreme Court probe of alleged electoral irregularities against Rousseff and Temer that would, if they were found guilty, require them both to step down.
"The way forward is to hold new elections," she said.
Comments
Comments are closed.