Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff won a temporary reprieve Tuesday from threatened impeachment thanks to a Supreme Court intervention and her principal opponent's decision to hold off for now on opening proceedings. Brazil's highest court slowed an expected rush to impeach Rousseff by ruling against lower house speaker Eduardo Cunha - the man with the power to trigger impeachment - on procedural questions.
Cunha said the ruling did not affect the basis for impeachment but delayed his final decision, which had been expected Tuesday, on several impeachment requests filed in Congress. "He will wait until next week before taking a decision," a spokesman for the speaker's office told AFP. This gave Rousseff - deeply unpopular less than a year into her second term amid steep recession and a huge corruption scandal - a breather as she scrambled to secure backers in Congress ahead of an eventual impeachment trial.
As speaker, Cunha has the power to shelve such requests or give them the green light, triggering a bruising battle that risks sending Latin America's biggest country from its current mix of instability and economic paralysis into full-blown crisis. The Supreme Court caused a temporary hiccup by ruling that a decision on accepting any of the impeachment requests lodged in Congress can only be taken by Cunha himself and not by other opposition figures. This means that Cunha must take full responsibility for triggering the process.
Now the timing of Cunha's next move is seen by analysts as being bound up with his own struggles to escape corruption allegations, including that he hid millions of dollars in Swiss bank accounts. Although experts disagree about the solidity of the legal case against the former leftist guerrilla, the impeachment threat is widely seen as posing a mortal threat to Rousseff's political credibility, already weakened by the wider crisis in the country. Rousseff says moves against her are a "coup plot."
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