Lula rallies support for Rousseff ahead of impeachment vote

Ahead of one of the most crucial weeks of his political career Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's famous voice had a dry, raspy edge to it as he addressed a rally of fired-up supporters in a São Paulo auditorium Friday night.

The 70-year-old former metal worker turned Brazil’s first working-class president looked tired after several weeks of criss-crossing the country.

He is fighting a desperate rearguard action to try to prevent the impeachment of his protégée and successor Dilma Rousseff, whose administration has been engulfed by a corruption scandal that has implicated both leaders and provided their opponents with the opportunity to eject their Workers’ Party from power after 13 years.

But despite his obvious fatigue there were flashes of the old rhetorical power that has held Brazil’s left captive for decades.

“Under no circumstance will I keep quiet, only when I die. No one is going to make me bow my head,” he warned his critics before closing his speech with the rallying call of impeachment’s opponents: “There will be no coup!”

Amid a cacophony of drumbeats the crowd, composed mainly of students young enough to be his grandchildren but who treated him like a rock star, roared their support.

The political thermometer is rising in Brazil as the lower house of the country's congress prepares to vote, possibly as early as Sunday, on whether to suspend Ms Rousseff from office while her ultimate fate is decided in the senate.

While both sides are seeking to rally public opinion behind them, the main focus is now on the capital Brasília which is the scene of a desperate struggle between the president and her opponents, led by her estranged vice-president Michel Temer, to win over those deputies who have yet to declare their vote.

Already Ms Rousseff has cancelled plans to attend the lighting of the Olympic torch in Greece later this month, opting to stay at home as she battles to save her mandate by reportedly negotiating ministries and funds for pet projects in a bid to sway undecided deputies her way.

As her chief negotiator it is Mr Lula who is tasked with mustering the third of the lower house needed to prevent impeachment. His mission is hampered by a corrosive flood of details that keep tumbling out of the corruption investigation at state oil giant Petrobras and public anger at the longest recession in Latin America's biggest economy in decades.

But even if Mr Lula succeeds in preventing at least 172 deputies in the 513-member chamber from backing impeachment Ms Rousseff’s problems will be far from over. She remains vulnerable to new developments in the Petrobras inquiry, especially claims that she sought to obstruct the investigation.

Meanwhile, the risk of having her mandate cancelled by the country's electoral court increased last week after the supreme court accepted the plea-bargain agreement of one of the companies caught up in the Petrobras investigation. Senior executives of Andrade Gutierrez said some of the money they stole from the oil company was recycled as contributions to Ms Rousseff's 2014 re-election campaign, a claim her team vehemently denied.

Also hanging over her is the threat by the head of the lower house, Eduardo Cunha, to table further impeachment motions against Ms Rousseff should the current one fail. Among those on his desk is one from the Brazilian bar association, which jurists say by focusing on corruption makes a more compelling case than the motion currently under debate, which centres on claims Ms Rousseff broke laws restricting spending.

"It is like being on the beach and you have a wave of two metres coming in and behind it a wave of three metres and behind it one of five metres," says Oscar Vilhena Vieira, dean of the law school at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo.

With the potential for the crisis to drag on even if Ms Rousseff survives the current impeachment effort, several parties in congress have suggested a constitutional amendment to allow for new presidential elections as an exit from the impasse.

The Workers’ Party says such a move would like impeachment amount to a coup by stealth. But with the opposition also implicated in the Petrobras affair and despite all the accusations levelled against him it is Mr Lula who currently leads opinion polls.