In a marathon session that ended in the early hours of Friday morning, Brazil's supreme court rejected a last-ditch effort by the government of Dilma Rousseff to halt a congressional vote on her impeachment.
The emergency ruling cleared the way for the lower house of congress to start debating the president’s removal for breaking budgetary laws, with her opponents increasingly confident they will muster the two thirds majority necessary to pass the motion.
“The government is trying to defend itself and the appeal to the court must be a signal that politically the numbers in congress are not favourable,” said Oscar Vilhena Vieira, dean of the law school at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo.
The most closely watched tally of voting intentions calculated by the Estado de S Paulo newspaper showed that on the eve of the debate, impeachment had the declared support of the 342 deputies necessary to pass the motion.
In recent days the president has haemorrhaged support, with two of her dwindling band of coalition partners announcing their deputies would overwhelmingly back impeachment.
José Eduardo Cardozo, the attorney general leading Rousseff’s defence, argued before the supreme court that manipulation of the lower house’s procedures by its head Eduardo Cunha rendered the impeachment process illegal.
Cunha has sought to use his authority to shape the debate in ways the president’s defence argued are prejudicial to a fair hearing.
Cunha originally tabled the motion in revenge for the failure of Rousseff’s Workers Party to shield him from punishment for lying about his involvement in the giant Petrobras scandal, for which he also faces losing his mandate.
Though her disregard of budgetary laws is the formal motive for the impeachment push, Rousseff’s mandate has been undermined by public anger at her party’s involvement in the Petrobras affair and her disastrous mismanagement of the economy which is experiencing its worst recession in decades.
The three-day debate is expected to culminate in a vote on Sunday night. The president’s supporters claim they have the 200 votes necessary to block the move but their list includes deputies from allied parties that have since declared their support for her removal.
Both sides are involved in furious lobbying trying to sway deputies their way with offers of funds for pet projects and positions in the public sector for their supporters.
Earlier this week Rousseff said she would seek to negotiate a national pact “between all political forces, without winners and losers” if she survived the vote. But if she lost she said she would be “a card out of the pack” when it came to trying to build a new government.
If the lower house of congress passes the impeachment motion the process then moves to the senate. If it accepts, by a simple majority, the lower house’s motion, Rousseff will be suspended from office for up to six months while it debates her ultimate fate. Her estranged vice-president Michel Temer, who she has accused of coup-mongering and who has also been cited in the Petrobras probe, would then take over.
For impeachment to pass in the senate a two thirds majority is again required. Though in recent weeks her support has started to erode there as well, Rousseff can count on a less hostile environment in the upper house than in the lower chamber.
Before then though the possibility for future judicial appeals by the government was left open by the supreme court as its session drew to a close yesterday morning. The court’s president Ricardo Lewandowski said it could still examine whether the fiscal manoeuvres of the Rousseff administration amount to crimes, as claimed by the impeachment motion.
Such an appeal by the administration after a vote against the basis of the lower house’s motion could delay the process from reaching the senate and thus hold off Rousseff’s suspension from office.
But even if Rousseff survives Sunday’s vote, the prospects of that marking an end to the crisis look remote. Her coalition has been dismembered and she now lacks a majority in a deeply polarised congress, making it unlikely she will be able to push through an economic package to tackle the recession.
She also faces a possible second impeachment motion tabled by Brazil’s bar association which accuses her, among other things, of trying to obstruct the Petrobras probe. Brazil’s electoral court is also studying whether to cancel her mandate following claims her 2014 re-election campaign was in part financed by money looted from the state oil company.
“The political polarisation we currently see is going to continue regardless of whether impeachment is approved or not,” says Ricardo Luiz Mendes Ribeiro, a political analyst at São Paulo consultancy MCM.
