Brazil President Facing Impeachment Has Alienated Many Allies
By Andrew Jacobs, NY Times, May 1, 2016
BRASÍLIA--They were idealists, united in the struggle against Brazil’s military dictators.
As democracy flourished, so did their careers. One of them, Paulo Ziulkoski, became the leader of an association of Brazilian cities. The other, Dilma Rousseff, rose even higher, becoming the president of Latin America’s largest country.
But their friendship soon fell apart. During a contentious meeting with the nation’s mayors in 2012, Ms. Rousseff rejected pleas for a share of Brazil’s soaring oil revenues. After the room erupted in jeers, Mr. Ziulkoski said, she stormed up to him, poked a finger in his face and humiliated him with a string of expletives.
“I never imagined a president could utter such words,” Mr. Ziulkoski said, noting that dozens of mayors have abandoned Ms. Rousseff and her party. To Mr. Ziulkoski, the public dressing down was the kind of rupture that symbolized “the beginning of the end for her administration.”
As Ms. Rousseff wages a last-ditch battle to stave off impeachment and save her presidency, she has accused her rivals in Congress of creating turmoil, saying they are orchestrating a coup d’état to oust her.
More than two-thirds of Brazil’s lower house voted last month to approve an impeachment measure on charges that she illegally borrowed from state banks to plug budget holes. (She is not accused of stealing for her personal enrichment.) Many experts say the next step, a trial in the Senate that could begin in the coming weeks, will probably end in her removal.
“I will struggle with all my might until the coup-mongers are defeated,” Ms. Rousseff said in an interview.
But many political analysts say Ms. Rousseff’s slow-motion downfall can also be tied to an autocratic persona and a go-it-alone work style that has driven away scores of political allies, former staff members and cabinet minsters, many of whom have endured searing episodes of public humiliation.
“She’s alienated so many politicians and squandered the good will of so many people, in part because of her terrible political skills but also because of her arrogance,” said Edson Sardinha, the editor of Congresso em Foco, a magazine that focuses on government corruption. “In her hour of need, very few people are willing to run to her defense.”
The upheaval goes far beyond Ms. Rousseff’s leadership style. Brazil is enduring its worst economic crisis in decades, with millions of people falling out of the middle class into poverty. Inflaming their rage, political elites of every stripe have engorged themselves in a multibillion-dollar graft scheme engulfing the national oil company.
Ms. Rousseff, who has been politically battered by the scandal, said she was the victim of a naked power grab by rivals and sexist assumptions of how a woman should lead. She also said she was a convenient scapegoat for something she cannot control: the global plunge in commodity prices that has sent the economy into a tailspin.
But her vow to bring millions of Brazilians into the streets in her defense has produced little popular support. Siding with her opponents are scores of onetime allies--including five former ministers in her administration--the nation’s vice president and six justices on the Supreme Court who were appointed by Ms. Rousseff or her most powerful defender, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
The disaffected figures include Antonio Patriota, a former foreign minister, who told associates that he could no longer bear Ms. Rousseff’s scoldings, and Guido Mantega, a finance minister who was stunned to learn of his dismissal from an interview that the president gave to a television reporter.
In more than five years in office, Ms. Rousseff has largely refused to meet with members of Congress, both opponents and allies, a decision that helped erode the majority support she once enjoyed in the lower house. The aggrieved include Eduardo Suplicy, a former senator and one of the most beloved figures in Ms. Rousseff’s Workers’ Party, who said she had turned down multiple requests for a meeting.
“In politics, either you talk or you die,” said Alfredo Nascimento, who saidMs. Rousseff had forced him to resign as transportation minister after he was wrongly accused of corruption. Mr. Nascimento was later exonerated, but by then it was too late. In April, he voted for her impeachment.
“I can’t support a president who is incapable of governing,” he said.
Within the vast bureaucracy that inhabits Brasília, the capital, most everyone can recount stories about Ms. Rousseff’s intolerance for dissent and her short fuse. The anecdotes include the time she smashed an office computer in a pique of anger, her refusal to meet with indigenous leaders or gay rights activists and the castigation of aides for the smallest of infractions.
She is also finding little sympathy from the Brazilian news media, which has long viewed her as cold and condescending--a marked contrast to the charismatic, backslapping approach of Mr. da Silva.
Some agree that Ms. Rousseff is being judged by a double standard that has unfairly tarnished powerful women around the world. Would she be considered so obstinate and uncooperative if she were a man? Or would she simply be called a strong, decisive leader?
But Antonia Melo, a former Workers’ Party member, said Ms. Rousseff’s gruff manner had alienated many of the party faithful. Ms. Melo described a meeting, when Ms. Rousseff was minister of energy, during which activists hoped to make their case against a contentious dam project in the Amazon.
Ms. Melo said she had barely finished her first sentence when Ms. Rousseff cut her off, pounded on the table and vowed to press forward with the dam’s construction. Then she turned around and left the room.
“We stood there looking at each other in silence, perplexed,” Ms. Melo said. “We felt so disrespected and discarded.”
The episode was especially stinging given the origin of the Workers’ Party and Ms. Rousseff’s pedigree as a champion of the disenfranchised. The party’s founders were Marxist guerrillas who rose to power through a coalition of trade unionists, landless farmers, indigenous activists and leftist intellectuals who helped pave the way for the re-establishment of democracy in 1985.
But that coalition is in tatters. Ms. Rousseff is battling accusations that she used budgetary sleight of hand to hide the depths of Brazil’s economic troubles and enhance her re-election prospects. Many bedrock supporters are disillusioned by widespread corruption in the national oil company, Petrobras, and by what many describe as Ms. Rousseff’s about-face on several campaign promises to preserve generous government spending that she broke shortly after her re-election in 2014.
In recent weeks, at least 135 mayors aligned with the Workers’ Party have changed their party affiliations--about a fifth of the nation’s mayors who had been elected on the party’s ticket. Among them are João Paulo Ribeiro, 31, the popular mayor of a small city, who said he had grown weary of the attacks by residents and even friends who questioned his association with Ms. Rousseff’s party.
“The federal government has had more successes than failures, but I have to listen to the people,” said Mr. Ribeiro, who changed parties last month, hoping to improve his chances for re-election in October.
It is not as if the political figures lining up to oust Ms. Rousseff were viewed as saviors. Many of them are battling serious accusations of corruption as well, and they were also in positions of great power as the country’s once-enviable economy ran aground.
Rising unemployment and the broad, popular unrest over Brazil’s economy only added to the strains between Ms. Rousseff and Congress. Had the Brazilian economy been ascendant--as it was in 2005 when her predecessor, Mr. da Silva, became embroiled in a vote-buying scandal--she might have avoided impeachment.
What is more, the end of Brazil’s bonanza complicated the patronage used to navigate the fractious legislature, in which more than two dozen political parties fight for funding from the state.
“We have a political system based on extracting money from the economy and transferring it to political parties to finance elections,” said Rubens Ricúpero, a Brazilian economist and diplomat who served as minister of finance in the mid-1990s.
Many Brazilian economists and policy makers contend that the economic crisis was, to a large extent, a product of Ms. Rousseff’s own making. She gradually increased the government’s footprint in the economy, spending large amounts on favored industries and specific corporations in an attempt to build up national champions.
That not only produced an array of big, unfinished projects and bad debt, which now hobbles the state-owned banks, but also opened the door to large-scale corruption.
“Brazil insisted in carrying out an industrial policy devoid of logic,” said Arminio Fraga, a former governor of the Central Bank of Brazil. “When the government offers companies all sorts of advantages, through protection, subsidies and contracts, it creates enormous space for this sort of thing.”
Friends and associates say Ms. Rousseff’s worldview and personality were partly shaped by the three years she was imprisoned by the military, a trauma that included torture like beatings and shocks with an electric baton.
As president, Ms. Rousseff has refused to seek vengeance against her torturers, and she was widely praised for backing a National Truth Commission that exposed the abuses of the era but did not mete out punishments to the accused. Ms. Rousseff has repeatedly declined to talk about her experiences, but in 2014, she wept on television after receiving the commission’s final report.
Brazilian politics is notoriously dirty, and many of the 25 parties that make up Congress are little more than vehicles for the enrichment of their members.
Nearly two-thirds of the 594 members in Congress face serious charges like bribery, electoral fraud, kidnapping and homicide, among them Eduardo Cunha, the speaker of the lower house leading the impeachment effort. He has been accused of stashing $40 million in bribes in a Swiss bank account.
Ms. Rousseff has not been accused of graft, though many people question her innocence, given her role as chairwoman of the national oil company at a time when the epic kickback scheme was being hatched.
In an interview last month, Ms. Rousseff brushed off suggestions that her disdain for retail politics and the horse trading required to pass legislation had contributed to her woes. But she defended her decision to ignore members of Congress.
“There were certain types of blackmail negotiations I would not engage in,” she said.
For a time, the Brazilian public viewed her steely resolve as a positive attribute. During her first year in office, Ms. Rousseff’s popularity stood at 77 percent, among the highest percentages in recent history. These days, that figure is in the single digits.
Many Brazilians still admire Ms. Rousseff’s ethics, and they fondly recall accounts of how she taught one of her maids in the presidential palace to read. But after two years of economic turmoil and political paralysis, her televised speeches now prompt a cacophony on the streets of Brazilian cities, as thousands of people bang on pots and pans to drown out her voice.
Amid the anger, few give Ms. Rousseff credit for some of her biggest achievements, including passage of a landmark freedom of information law and measures that gave federal police and prosecutors powerful new tools to tackle corruption.
In some ways, analysts said, Ms. Rousseff has become a victim of those laws, which paved the way for the investigations that have claimed scores of the nation’s political and business elite, and exposed the depths of Brazil’s political rot.
