Drive to impeach Rousseff accelerates as Lula fights back

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Drive to impeach Rousseff accelerates as Lula fights back

12:00 CAT | 22 Mar 2016

Reuters / Dilma Rousseff

Brazil’s struggling leftist government is fighting on two fronts as impeachment proceedings threaten President Dilma Rousseff and legal battles harry her predecessor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Ms Rousseff’s decision to call Mr Lula to the rescue backfired last week, when a judge blocked his nomination as chief of staff over graft charges.

As congress holds a new session on Tuesday, impeachment proceedings launched last week in the lower house appear to be gaining momentum: a poll released on Saturday found 68% of Brazilians are in favour — up eight percentage points from last month.

A separate poll on Monday found the congressional impeachment committee weighing the accusations against Ms Rousseff is almost evenly split: 32 members favour impeachment, 31 are against and two are undecided. Taking the lower house as a whole, 62% of members of parliament think Ms Rousseff will be removed from office — nearly triple last month’s rate.

She is accused of manipulating state accounts in 2014 to boost public spending during her re-election campaign, and again last year to hide the depth of Brazil’s recession.

The committee is tasked with making a recommendation to the full congress on whether to impeach. A vote by two-thirds of the 513 members of parliament in the lower house and half the 81 senators would trigger an impeachment trial in the senate.

In that event, Ms Rousseff would be suspended from her duties for up to 180 days. A two-thirds vote would remove her from office.

Mr Lula is, meanwhile, fighting for his blocked cabinet post, and the ministerial immunity that comes with it. His lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court yesterday to annul a ruling by one of its own judges suspending his appointment.

His foundation, the Lula Institute, lashed out at what it called a “series of arbitrary actions” by the judiciary since Mr Lula came under suspicion in the investigation into a multibillion-dollar corruption scheme centred on the state oil company, Petrobras.

Mr Lula, who presided over a booming Brazil from 2003 to 2011, has been charged with money laundering over a luxury apartment and a country home he is suspected of receiving as bribes from companies implicated in the scandal.

His foundation dismissed the charges as unfounded and accused investigators of waging a “media assassination” campaign.

It condemned Mr Lula’s detention for questioning earlier this month as “violent, coercive and baseless” and said a request for his arrest was “arbitrary” and “unconstitutional.”

Until the Supreme Court reaches a final ruling on Mr Lula’s appointment, he risks being placed in preventive detention by the crusading anticorruption judge leading the Petrobras investigation, Sergio Moro.

The court is not due to reconvene until March 30.

Source: AFP