The
great betrayal
Dilma Rousseff has
let her country down. But so has the entire political class
Apr 23rd 2016 | From
the print edition
BRAZIL’S Congress
has witnessed some bizarre scenes in its time. In 1963 a senator
aimed a gun at his arch-enemy and killed another senator by mistake.
In 1998 a crucial government bill failed when a congressman pushed
the wrong button on his electronic voting device. But the spectacle
in the lower house on April 17th surely counts among the oddest. One
by one, 511 deputies filed towards a crowded microphone and, in
ten-second bursts broadcast to a rapt nation, voted on the
impeachment of the president, Dilma Rousseff. Some were draped in
Brazilian flags. One launched a confetti rocket. Many gushed
dedications to their home towns, religions, pet causes—and even
Brazil’s insurance brokers. The motion to forward charges against
Ms Rousseff to the Senate for trial passed by 367 votes to 137, with
seven abstentions.
The vote comes at a
desperate time. Brazil is struggling with its worst recession since
the 1930s. GDP is expected to shrink by 9% from the second quarter of
2014, when the recession started, to the end of this year. Inflation
and the unemployment rate are both around 10%.
The failure is not
only of Ms Rousseff’s making. The entire political class has let
the country down through a mix of negligence and corruption. Brazil’s
leaders will not win back the respect of its citizens or overcome the
economy’s problems unless there is a thorough clean-up.
Ditching Dilma
Sunday’s vote was
not the end of Ms Rousseff, but her departure cannot now be far off.
Brazil ought not to mourn her. Incompetence in her first term in
office, from 2011 to 2014, has made the country’s economic plight
incomparably worse. Her Workers’ Party (PT) is a prime mover behind
a gargantuan bribery scheme centred on Petrobras, the
state-controlled oil company, which channelled money from contractors
to politicians and parties. Although Ms Rousseff has not been
personally implicated in the wrongdoing, she tried to shield her
predecessor as president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from
prosecution.
What is alarming is
that those who are working for her removal are in many ways worse. If
the Senate votes to put her on trial, probably by mid-May, Ms
Rousseff will have to step aside for up to 180 days. The
vice-president, Michel Temer, who comes from a different party, will
take over and serve out her term if the Senate removes her from
office (see article). Mr Temer may provide short-term economic
relief. Unlike the hapless Ms Rousseff, he knows how to get things
done in Brasília and his Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement
(PMDB) is friendlier to business than the PT.
But the PMDB is
hopelessly compromised, too. One of its leaders is the speaker of the
lower house, Eduardo Cunha, who presided over Sunday’s six-hour
impeachment spectacle and has himself been charged by the supreme
court with taking bribes through the Petrobras scheme. In announcing
their “no” votes, some of Ms Rousseff’s allies denounced Mr
Cunha as a “gangster” and a “thief”.
The taint of
corruption is spread across many Brazilian parties. Of the 21
deputies under investigation in the Petrobras affair, 16 voted for Ms
Rousseff’s impeachment. About 60% of congressmen face accusations
of criminal wrongdoing.
There are no quick
ways of putting this right. The roots of Brazil’s political
dysfunction go back to the slave-based economy of the 19th century,
to dictatorship in the 20th and to a flawed electoral system that
both makes campaigns ruinously expensive and also shields politicians
from account.
In the short run,
impeachment will not fix this. The charge that is the basis for
trying Ms Rousseff—that she manipulated accounts last year to make
the fiscal deficit look smaller than it was—is so minor that just a
handful of congressmen bothered to mention it in their ten-second
tirades. If Ms Rousseff is ousted on a technicality, Mr Temer will
struggle to be seen as a legitimate president by the large minority
of Brazilians who still back Ms Rousseff.
Waxing and waning:
Brazil's economic woes, in charts
In any other
country, such a cocktail of economic decline and political conflict
might be combustible. Yet Brazil has remarkable reserves of
tolerance. Divided as they are over the rights and wrongs of
impeachment, Brazilians have kept their anger in check. The past
three decades suggest that theirs is a country which can endure a
crisis without resorting to coups or collapses. And here, perhaps, is
a shred of hope.
The fact that the
Petrobras scandal has ensnared some of the country’s most powerful
politicians and businessmen is a sign that some institutions,
especially those that enforce the law, are maturing. One reason
politicians are in such trouble is that a new, better-educated and
more assertive middle class refused to put up with their impunity.
Some of the statutes now being used to put away miscreants were
enacted by Ms Rousseff’s government.
One way of capturing
this spirit would be for the country to hold fresh elections. A new
president might have a mandate to embark on reforms that have eluded
governments for decades. Voters also deserve a chance to rid
themselves of the entire corruption-infested Congress. Only new
leaders and new legislators can undertake the fundamental reforms
that Brazil needs, in particular an overhaul of the corruption-prone
political system and of uncontrolled public spending, which pushes up
debt and hobbles growth.
Second best
True enough, the
path to renewal through the ballot box is strewn with obstacles.
Given its record, Congress is unlikely to pass the constitutional
amendment required to dissolve itself and hold an early general
election. The electoral tribunal could order a new presidential
ballot, on the ground that Petrobras bribe money helped finance the
re-election of Ms Rousseff and Mr Temer in 2014. But that is far from
certain.
There is thus a good
chance that Brazil will be condemned to muddle on under the current
generation of discredited leaders. Its voters should not forget this
moment. Because, in the end, they will have a chance to go to the
polls—and they should use it to vote for something better.
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