On Wednesday, thousands of people packed Paulista Avenue, in central São Paulo. Many were there to celebrate the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s first female President. They posed for photographs while holding plastic champagne flutes and servings of cake with yellow, green, and blue frosting—the colors of the Brazilian flag. Meanwhile, many others had turned out to condemn what they called a golpe: a coup. Earlier in the day, the country’s senators had voted overwhelmingly to remove Rousseff from office, but this apparent consensus belied a deep national rift, and on the street the crowds were bitterly divided. As night fell, lines of riot police separated the opposing groups, and officers used tear gas to disperse anti-impeachment demonstrators.
A majority of Brazilians had wanted Rousseff out, but few in the country appear to fully grasp the technical grounds for her impeachment: she was convicted of breaking budgetary laws by decreeing minor outlays without congressional approval and delaying payments to state banks. In practice, the impeachment trial served as a vote of no confidence in a President who had led the country into its longest recession in decades. The party she belongs to, the left-leaning Workers’ Party, had also been implicated in a corruption scheme that funnelled billions of dollars into political campaigns and offshore bank accounts during its thirteen years in power. The irony here is that many of the lawmakers who voted for Rousseff’s impeachment are themselves suspects in the scheme.
The impeachment trial lasted nearly a week. Rousseff was under no obligation to defend herself in person, and most believed she had little hope of swaying the senators’ votes. But she decided to testify anyway, submitting to fourteen hours of questioning. For her, it was a chance to define her place in history. She denounced her impeachment as a literal coup, and placed herself in a line of labor-friendly Presidents who were forced from office by the military in collusion with the country’s élites. She compared the trial this week to the one she faced in 1970, when she was imprisoned and tortured for her role in an urban guerrilla group fighting Brazil’s military regime. The difference between then and now, she said, is that “constitutional pretexts lend the appearance of legitimacy to a government taking power without support from the ballot box.”
In framing herself as a tragic hero fighting for the poor, Rousseff elided her own party’s pragmatic deal-making with Brazil’s corrupt establishment. She also underplayed the gravity of her budget maneuvers, which covered up a gaping deficit while she ran for reëlection, in 2014, in a campaign allegedly funded with bribe money. But questions about the process used to impeach her resonated with many Brazilians. According to one survey, only forty-nine per cent of Brazilians believe that the impeachment proceedings obeyed constitutional norms. This contrasts sharply with the broad consensus behind the last impeachment, in 1992, when Fernando Collor de Mello was forced from office amid allegations of personal enrichment. He later returned to political life, as a senator, and this week he voted for Rousseff’s impeachment—a typical twist in Brazilian politics.
Rousseff herself has not been accused of personal enrichment during her time in office, and even some of her adversaries have raised doubts about the legal basis for her removal. Shortly after the trial, Acir Gurgacz, a senator who had just voted to impeach Rousseff, admitted that he didn’t believe that her budget tricks counted as “crimes of responsibility,” the constitutional standard for impeachment. He instead justified his decision by citing her inability to govern the country, which is not technically an impeachable offense. Further confusing things, the senators separately voted on Wednesday not to ban Rousseff from public office for eight years, as the constitution’s article on impeachment appears to require, and as happened with Collor.
But Rousseff’s removal is now official, and in her place comes an administration with an agenda that was not endorsed by voters. Though Brazil’s new President, Michel Temer, ran on Rousseff’s ticket in 2014, he hails from the business-friendly Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, or P.M.D.B., which turned against the Workers’ Party last year. Since taking charge of the government as interim President, in May, when Rousseff was suspended from office to await trial, Temer has pursued deep austerity measures that include capping spending on health care and education. On Wednesday, after being sworn in, Temer gave a speech in which he explained, “The government is like your family. If it’s indebted, it must lower expenses to pay its debts.” Though simplistic, Temer’s message lined up with the prescriptions of many economists—but left out of his speech was the fact that, to shore up support for the impeachment vote, he had recently pushed for increases to top government salaries that will add billions of dollars to the federal budget.
Another omission: not once in his first address in office did Temer speak about corruption. For Temer, this made sense. Rousseff’s downfall began when a task force leading an investigation known as Lava Jato (Car Wash) uncovered a scheme to siphon off billions from the state oil company, and Temer’s own P.M.D.B. was soon identified as the Workers’ Party’s main partner in the scheme. For a while, in the mass demonstrations calling for Rousseff’s impeachment, many protesters vowed to keep marching until they brought Temer down, too. But, for now at least, those pledges appear to have faded—even as fresh revelations raise new questions about Temer and high-ranking figures in his new administration. According to the plea-bargain testimony of a construction tycoon, for instance, Temer was the beneficiary of some three hundred thousand dollars skimmed from a nuclear-energy contract. (Temer has denied the accusation.)
Other revelations have even more serious implications. In May, a secretly recorded conversation was leaked to the public in which Romero Jucá, a senator from the P.M.D.B. whom Temer had appointed as planning minister, was heard suggesting that the purpose of removing Rousseff was to “stop the bleeding” from the Lava Jato investigation. Amid an outcry from the press, Jucá was forced to step down as minister—but he remains a senator, and he voted for Rousseff’s impeachment. Behind the scenes in Brasília, Jucá’s fellow-lawmakers now reportedly hope to engineer an acordão—a grand bargain—that includes an amnesty to shield them from prosecution. Their hope is to stave off real change to the deeply corrupt system that produced them. As Temer consolidates his power, perhaps the most urgent question for Brazil’s democracy is whether real investigations will be allowed to continue, or whether politicians like Jucá will get their way. In Portuguese, the word golpe_ _means “coup”—but it can also mean “con.”
