Dilma Rousseff was impeached and Michel Temer assumes as Interim President

Now it’s official: after struggling months with doubts and uncertainties, the former President of the Federative Republic of Brazil, Ms. Dilma Vana Rousseff, was ultimately impeached to continue her mandate for the next 180 days, until the final voting session to decide whether she will lose or not her government power and the official title of President. From today until then, the Presidency will be temporarily occupied by her current Vice-President, Mr. Michel Miguel Elias Temer Lulia. If Rousseff renounces her government, or if she is convicted in the last instance of the legislative process of her impeachment, Temer will be the Interim President until the next presidential run, scheduled to happen in 2018.

The last voting session took place at the Federal Senate, and went from 7:00pm (Brasília time zone) of last Wednesday (11) until the early hours of today (May 12th). The score was 55 votes in favour of Rousseff’s impeachment, 22 against it, zero abstentions, and two absences – the minimum required to approve any matter in the Senate is simple majority, that is 40 parliamentarians. Rousseff was officially notified on this morning and, some hours later, presented a speech to the press and the general public in which she reinforced the illegitimacy of her exit and also that there are no evidences proving the crimes she’s being accused.

The voting in the Senate happened without any general confusion or mess, opposite to what happened in the previous voting session in the Chamber of the Deputies, on April 17th, in which the parliamentarians were out of control, each one aggressively defending their political views. Although there were some breaks, the session took twenty exhausting hours and was dragged and tiresome.

The most applauded speech was Aécio Neves’s, ex-opponent to Rousseff during the last presidential run, in which he criticizes how the former President had been conducting Brazil’s political economy – he voted in favour of her impeachment. On the other side, the most silent moment throughout the voting was when the Senator Fernando Collor de Mello, former President of Brazil from 1990 to 1992 and who was also impeached to finish his mandate, went up the tribune to declare his vote – Collor said he warned Rousseff of her risks on keeping up with the government (he renounced before the voting in the Senate, so he only lost his political rights for 8 years), but the Office of the President “turned a deaf ear to me, relegate my experience”.

After Collor voted in favour of Rousseff’s exit, the current President of the Federal Senate, Renan Calheiros, discoursed about the repetition of mistakes in the government and how she lost the centrality of Brazilian nation. When the minimum quorum was reached to evict Rousseff from the government, the ruling parliamentarians, hopeless, opted to attack the decision taken by their colleagues. However, the result of voting clarified the majority dissatisfaction with Rousseff – although she states there were no crimes, the depth of her involvement in recent corruption scandals provoked the increase of dissatisfied people with her government and the whole PT era (PT, standing for Workers’ Party).

Just few hours after Rousseff and Temer were both notified of the power transition, the current Interim President presented his brand-new ministerial crew, with 22 official files instead of the 32 existing in Rousseff’s mandate. Some nominations, however, were a bit awkwardly received by the public: Gilberto Kassab (PSD/SP, standing for Social Democracy’s Party for São Paulo state) assumes the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovations and Communications; Raul Jungmann (PPS/PE, standing for Popular Socialist Party for Pernambuco state) goes to the Ministry of Defense; Romero Jucá (PMDB/RR, standing for Brazilian Democratic Movement Party for Roraima state) takes on the Ministry of Planning, Development and Management; Geddel Vieira Lima (PMDB/BA, for Bahia state) is the new Chief Minister of Government Secretariat; Sérgio Etchegoyen, ex-Army Staff Chief, is now Chief Minister of Institutional Security Office; Bruno Araújo (PSDB/PE, standing for Brazilian Social Democracy Party) gets the Ministry of Villages; Blairo Maggi (PP/MT, standing for Progressive Party for Mato Grosso state) is now the Minister of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply; Henrique Meirelles, ex-president of Banco do Brasil (Brazil’s Bank), takes the Ministry of Finance; Mendonça Filho (DEM/PE, standing for Democrats) assumes the Ministry of Education and Culture; Eliseu Padilha (PMDB/RS, for Rio Grande do Sul state) was nominated as the new Chief Minister of Civil House; Osmar Terra (PMDB/RS) gets the Ministry of Social and Agrarian Development; Leonardo Picciani (PMDB/RJ, for Rio de Janeiro state) assumes the Ministry of Sports; Ricardo Barros (PP/PR, for Paraná state) is now the Minister of Health; José Sarney Filho (PV/MA, standing for Green Party for Maranhão state) gets the Ministry of Environment; Henrique Alves, who was Minister of Tourism during the first part of Rousseff’s second mandate and was fired by her, returns to his post with Temer as Interim President; José Serra (PSDB/SP) is the new Minister of International Affaires; Ronaldo Nogueira de Oliveira (PTB/RS, standing for Brazilian Worker’s Party) assumes the Ministry of Labour; Alexandre de Moraes, lawyer and legal consultant, is the new Minister of Justice; Maurício Quintella (PR/AL, standing for Republican Party for Alagoas state) gets the Ministry of Transport, Ports and Civil Aviation; Fabiano Augusto Martins Silveira, former Counselor at the National Council of Justice, now assumes as Minister of Supervision, Transparency and Control (previously known as the General Council of the Union); Marcos Pereira (PRB/ES, standing for Brazilian Republican Party for Espírito Santo state) gets the Ministry of Industry and Trade; and, finally, Fábio Medina Osório, jurist, assumes the General Attorney of the Union.

About some of the chosen ones: Kassab was already Minister of Science, Technology, Innovations and Communications during Rousseff’s government; Jucá was one of the main responsibles for the continuity of the impeachment process; Vieira Lima is heavily cited in documents related to Operação Lava-Jato (Car Wash Operation); Araújo was the deputy responsible to the deciding vote at the Chamber of the Deputies to continue Rousseff’s impeachment; Padilha was Minister of Civil Aviation during FHC (standing for Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former President of Brazil from 1994 to 2002), and was accused of irregularities in the payment of court orders; Sarney Filho is the son of José Sarney, former President of Brazil from 1985 to 1990, replacing Tancredo Neves, deceased before taking office, and also he was already Minister of Environment during FHC’s government; Serra was already candidate to the Presidency of Brazil twice, but was beaten first by Lula (2002) and after by Rousseff (2010); Quintella was convicted for joining a corruption scheme which diverted money intended for the payment of school meals, during his mandate as Secretary of Education in Alagoas state. By all these informations, it’s not that hard to infer that, although Rousseff was taken away from the government, there are still a lot of work to do in the name of Brazilian political welfare, so are there to heal the systemic corruption knotty to Brazilian corruption system.

Dilma Rousseff, until new changes, is not anymore the President of Brazil, and this is a true victory to Brazilian Parliament, since Rousseff was seen as persona non grata amidst parliamentarians due to her lack of dialogue with both Senate and Chamber of Deputies. However, having Temer as Interim President might be also dangerous to the actual fragile political system in the country, as he has a huge amount of work to do.

The economy is failed and destroyed; the politicians are very divided and making harder the agreements utterly important to approve laws; the society is still fiery, waiting for immediate results, and it’s his function to avoid new public uprisings if these changes do not come in the speed it wishes. Finally, he also must deal with the implications of the police investigation on Operação Lava-Jato, since Rousseff’s exit is not the last stand of the hard work the Legislative has been doing – there are still many things to be explained by the investigation, and Temer should not make any move to try avoiding it, or else the population will be angrily right to go and protest on the streets, as he will be doing the same thing Rousseff tried to do in her final months as President.