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President
Dilma Rousseff: Even her “mentor” Lula has lost faith
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The predecessor and mentor to Brazil's president says she is
running on empty. The chief opposition
party says it is ready to take over. And the leader of the
lower house of Congress says Brazil should reconsider the role and power of the
presidency. This is not the usual
jockeying of Brazil's noisy, multiparty democracy.
Rather, the economic and
political crisis now engulfing Latin America's biggest economy is prompting
politicians, economists and ordinary Brazilians to consider what once seemed
unthinkable: that President Dilma Rousseff, re-elected less than nine months
ago, might not finish her second term, which runs to 2018.
"It's a real
possibility," says Carlos Melo, a political scientist at Insper, a São
Paulo business school. "Bad policies and political stagnation have grown
into something more urgent."
Reuters report continues:
No one expects Rousseff,
a 68-year-old former bureaucrat turned energy minister, to step down tomorrow.
She has repeatedly said
she will not resign. Impeachment would require proof, none of which exists so
far, that she committed crimes or other wrongdoing, particularly with regards
to a bribery scandal involving state-run energy company Petroleo Brasileiro SA,
or Petrobras.
But the mere notion of
political instability illustrates how far Brazil has fallen from its zenith
just five years ago. Back then, as Rousseff rode the coattails of her
predecessor into office, Brazil was aloft a commodities boom and considered a
star among developing nations, posting annual economic growth of 7.5 percent
even as the developed world staggered.
Now, Brazil's economy is
likely in recession, unemployment is climbing and inflation is galloping at
nearly 9 percent, or double the official target rate, eroding purchasing power
for the working-class most buoyed by the boom.
Meanwhile, the Petrobras
scandal edges uncomfortably close to top aides, a federal auditor may soon
reject the government's 2014 bookkeeping and her approval ratings have
plummeted to single digits, lower than any president in a quarter century.
On Tuesday, the Eurasia
Group, a consultancy, raised the probability of Rousseff leaving office early
from 20 percent to 30 percent.
"There is political
risk beyond what anyone expected," said Neil Shearing, senior economist at
Capital Economics in London. "It's not good for anyone trying to make
investments or plans."
Rousseff remains defiant
amid the criticism and even recent rumors that suggested she attempted suicide,
a claim she vigorously denied. "Don't bet on that, people," she said
in an interview published Tuesday in the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper.
"I will not
fall," she told the paper, calling talk of her exit as
"golpista," or putschist.
Still, even members of
her ruling Workers' Party are rebelling.
The leftist party opposes
her ongoing efforts to impose austerity measures, seen by most economists as
essential after a prior term of bloated budgets and interventionist policies.
Some party legislators have even voted to increase spending.
Former President Luiz
Inácio Lula da Silva, the party's biggest star and a possible candidate in
2018, has increasingly distanced himself from Rousseff, whom he plucked from
obscurity and named the party standard bearer when he faced a constitutional
term limit. Recently, he compared Rousseff's standing to near-empty reservoirs
of drought-plagued São Paulo.
A second term was not
supposed to go like this.
Though Brazil's economy
stagnated soon after Rousseff began her first term, she retained enough
blue-collar support to clinch re-election last October. Campaigning on a
promise to expand social welfare programs, she vowed to improve education,
health and other precarious services.
Because of the eroding
economy, though, she changed course soon after, scrambling for ways to slash
spending. Not only would few new investments be made, but some social programs,
like a student loan mechanism, lost funding.
"It was really
damaging to the base," says one official who managed Rousseff's response
to a student backlash.
Support in Congress
collapsed, too.
In February, the lower
house elected Eduardo Cunha, an Evangelical Congressman, to head the chamber,
with twice as many votes as those cast for Rousseff's candidate. Although
Cunha's party in theory is allied with Rousseff, he has slowed her legislative
agenda and recently said she was so weak that Brazil should switch to a
parliamentary system.
Few are as emboldened as
the centrist Social Democracy party, which last weekend re-elected as its
leader Aécio Neves, the senator Rousseff defeated last October. The
administration, Neves told reporters, was headed toward an "an
interruption."
His party, Neves said, is
ready to govern.
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