BRASILIA, Brazil — President Dilma Rousseff lost a crucial impeachment vote in Brazil’s lower house on Sunday evening, making her removal ever more likely and deepening the country’s political crisis less than four months before the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
Rousseff’s opponents easily obtained the two-thirds majority of votes in the 513-member Chamber of Deputies needed to pass the impeachment measure. Voting one by one in a rollicking marathon session broadcast live to a rapt Brazilian public, the pro-impeachment lawmakers celebrated on the floor of parliament as they vaulted past the minimum threshold needed to repudiate her.
“To rescue the hope that was stolen from the Brazilian people, I vote yes,” said Shéridan de Anchieta, one of the many anti-Rousseff lawmakers whose statements brought rowdy applause and jeers to the chamber. One lawmaker fired confetti into the air from a toy pistol after voting to sack the president.
The cascade of votes to boot Rousseff from office less than two years after her re-election was a powerful display of her abject political collapse and the extremes of her unpopularity. Rousseff, 68, is the hand-picked successor of iconic former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and their leftist Workers’ Party once seemed unassailable as it led Brazil through an extended period of prosperity that lifted tens of million out of poverty.
She and her supporters repeatedly denounced the impeachment attempt as “a coup” tantamount to an interruption of Brazilian democracy, which was restored in 1985 after 21 years of military rule.
Yet with Rousseff’s approval rating hovering around 10 percent, Sunday’s vote turned into a visceral repudiation of the 13 years that she and Lula have been in power. It was a stunning reversal of fortune in a country where everything seemed to be going right just a few years earlier when a global commodity boom had the Brazilian economy purring.Now Brazil is mired in its worst economic slump since the 1930s. A frightening Zika epidemic continues to spread. With the country’s leaders consumed by political combat and a broad corruption scandal, Brazil today is a far angrier and more divided country than the one picked in 2009 to host this summer’s Olympics.
The impeachment measure will now move to Brazil’s senate, where only a simple majority is needed to force Rousseff to step down. Senators would have 180 days to conduct formal impeachment hearings before a final vote to determine her fate while Vice President Michel Temer – Rousseff’s former running mate and now rival – assumes temporary control.
Rousseff isn’t accused of stealing, but her opponents said she should be impeached because her administration allegedly tried to cover up budget gaps with money from government banks. She has denied any wrongdoing.
The specifics of those charges were barely referred to during Sunday’s proceedings – lawmakers voting for impeachment concentrated on attacking corruption and Rousseff’s economic record in 10-second speeches that were screamed as often as they were spoken.
“Lula and Dilma in jail! I vote yes for impeachment,” shouted Soraya Santos, a deputy from the state of Rio de Janeiro.
But many Brazilians unhappy with Rousseff also are wary of the lawmakers leading the impeachment push, more than half of whom are under investigation themselves on suspicion of corruption, bribery and other misdeeds, including Eduardo Cunha, the speaker of the lower house, who orchestrated the vote.
Brazil’s president is in trouble. President Dilma Rousseff could be facing an impeachment hearing over the summer, right when the country is hosting the world for the Olympic Games. (Dom Phillips,Nick Miroff,Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)
Said Communist Party deputy Marcivania Flexa, before voting against impeachment: “I have never seen so much hypocrisy.”
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