Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who is facing the prospect of impeachment, saw her woes deepen early yesterday as Brazilian Vice President Michel Temer appeared to distance himself from her.
Temer is from the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), the main partner in Brazil’s ruling coalition along with Rousseff’s Workers’ Party. Rousseff is accused of illegal accounting maneuvers in the government’s handling of the budget.
She has repeatedly said the accounting practices were a long-accepted practice under previous governments and described the impeachment move as a coup.
The Brazilian Congress began convening an impeachment committee on Monday.
That began what could be a months-long battle over the president’s fate, as the world’s seventh-largest economy suffers a recession and the fallout from a giant corruption scandal centered on state oil company Petrobras.
It also focused attention on whether PMDB would remain loyal to the president.
Temer had maintained total silence since the impeachment crisis broke last week, in what some analysts saw as a signal he was preparing to abandon Rousseff. If she were forced from office, he would replace her as interim president.
However, in a letter from him to Rousseff published in Brazilian news outlets early yesterday, Temer criticized the president.
Temer’s office said he was not breaking with the government, but rather “defending the reunification of the country,” according to the news Web site G1.
In the letter, Temer told the president that during her first term in office, starting in 2011, he always felt like a “decorative” part of the government and that she did not trust him.
“I always felt certain that the first lady and those around her did not trust me or the PMDB,” Temer is quoted as saying in the letter, which was carried in its entirety in major newspapers.
Temer accused the president of ignoring him on major policy decisions and trying to divide his party.
As recently as Monday, the president had said she believed Temer would stand by her.
For now, the presidency believes it has enough support to ride out impeachment.
The lower house would have to vote by more than two-thirds for the case to be sent for a formal trial in the Brazilian Senate, where again a two-thirds majority would be needed to remove Rousseff from office.
Rousseff, who is only a year into her second term and with popularity ratings of barely 10 percent, has come out swinging since months of rhetoric in Congress ended with the launching of the impeachment process last week.
She called on Congress to speed up proceedings and to scrap the annual holidays that run from Dec. 23 through to February, when the carnivals are held.
Brazil, host of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics next year, is in a deep gloom, with GDP down 4.5 percent in the third quarter year-on-year and the national currency down a third against the US dollar this year.
Rousseff is also tainted by the Petrobras scandal, which has sucked in leading politicians and business figures, exposing the depth of corruption at the highest levels in Brazil.
Even though the president herself has not been linked to any Petrobras-related crimes, the saga is adding to the sense of drift that has plagued her second term.
Some experts say that Rousseff is being tried for political reasons — as punishment for having presided over a general decline — rather than the arguably technical crimes of accounting malpractice.
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