After a brief intermission, Brazil’s gripping political drama is entering a new act. The Senate has chosen the members of a special commission that will decide whether to move forward with impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff, and the first hearings have begun.
Early projections suggest that the majority of the senate favors full impeachment. If a trial is launched to judge the merit of the case, Rousseff will be suspended for up to 180 days, and her vice-president and coalition partner, the PMDB party’s Michel Temer, will become the acting president.
If found guilty of the crimes of which she’s accused, Rousseff will be permanently removed from the presidency. If acquitted, she will return as president to finish her mandate—but with more than two thirds of the lower house having voted to investigate her, her position would be untenable.
If it comes off, this will be a spectacular feat of political assassination. When the lower house authorized the initiation of proceedings against Rousseff and sent the matter to the senate, it ostensibly did so based on “crimes of responsibility.” But these grounds were merely a technical necessity, offering Rousseff’s opponents what they had been looking for some time: a legal opportunity to remove an unpopular president.
