On Friday, March 4, about 200 federal policemen and 30 tax auditors raided the apartment of former president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, who was taken to Congonhas airport for a three-hour interrogation while his home and institute were searched.
The raid was part of Operation Car Wash, a set of investigations begun two years ago into corruption in Petrobras, the partially state-owned oil company. This latest development raises some serious questions not just about the survival of his successor, President Dilma Rousseff, but about the rule of law and the state of Brazil’s democracy.
Re-elected to a second term in 2014, Rousseff is now dealing with five major problems: Brazil’s worst economic recession in over a century; a congressional push to impeach her; a review of her campaign finances by the Federal Electoral Court (which could see the anullment of her electoral victory); the Car Wash investigation, and the spread of the Zika virus.
But while this deep crisis might seem new, several of these problems actually reflect long-term changes.
From 1995 to about 2012, it was taken for granted that Brazilian presidents could forge a working majority in Congress, despite an electoral system of open-list proportional representation with very large districts, a dizzying array of parties (28 in today’s Congress) and the fact that the president’s party has always held less than 20 percent of congressional seats.
