Political Fault Lines in Post-Rousseff Brazil

Matthew Taylor

Politics, Latin America

Where do things go now? 

After nearly nine months, Brazil’s impeachment drama is over.

The process ended on a curiously subdued note: the Senate’s questioning of Dilma Rousseff on Monday was a staid affair, and Tuesday’s speeches were calculatedly calm and measured. By the time the Senate began to vote yesterday, Rousseff’s removal was a foregone conclusion. But the civilized, even boring, proceedings obscured an important objective of this week’s debates: shaping the historical narrative that will guide each side’s supporters over Michel Temer administration’s next twenty-eight months in office.

On the Senate floor, Rousseff and her defenders stuck tenaciously and defiantly to script: the fiscal pretext for impeachment was weak and no previous president had been held responsible for the same errors; the economic crisis was not her doing but the result of international circumstances she could not control; and she herself never personally benefitted from the corruption that took place during her presidency. Rousseff was impressive, showing all of the qualities that led President Lula to choose her as his successor: attention to detail, intense message discipline, and an unwillingness to cede any ground. Most important to the Workers’ Party (PT) narrative, she returned over and over to the theme that when they lost at the polls in 2014, “sectors of the economic and political elite” began conspiring against her. By her account, the impeachment battle had its origins in Rousseff’s principled refusal to bargain with the former Chamber of Deputies President Eduardo Cunha, who is deeply enmeshed in his own bribery scandal but has yet to be removed by Congress. Rousseff was supported from the wings by twenty former ministers, her predecessor and mentor Lula, a number of PT bigwigs, and the starpower of crooner Chico Buarque.