BRAZIL’S Congress has witnessed
some bizarre scenes in its time. In 1963 a senator aimed a gun at his
arch-enemy and killed another senator by mistake. In 1998 a crucial government
bill failed when a congressman pushed the wrong button on his electronic voting
device. But the spectacle in the lower house on April 17th surely counts among
the oddest.
One by one, 511 deputies filed towards a crowded microphone and, in
ten-second bursts broadcast to a rapt nation, voted on the impeachment of the
president, Dilma Rousseff. Some were draped in Brazilian flags. One launched a
confetti rocket.
Many gushed dedications to their
home towns, religions, pet causes—and even Brazil’s insurance brokers. The
motion to forward charges against Ms Rousseff to the Senate for trial passed by
367 votes to 137, with seven abstentions.
The vote comes at a desperate
time. Brazil is struggling with its worst recession since the 1930s. GDP is
expected to shrink by 9% from the second quarter of 2014, when the recession
started, to the end of this year. Inflation and the unemployment rate are both
around 10%.
The failure is not only of Ms
Rousseff’s making. The entire political class has let the country down through
a mix of negligence and corruption. Brazil’s leaders will not win back the
respect of its citizens or overcome the economy’s problems unless there is a
thorough clean-up.
Ditching Dilma
Sunday’s vote was not the end of
Ms Rousseff, but her departure cannot now be far off. Brazil ought not to mourn
her. Incompetence in her first term in office, from 2011 to 2014, has made the
country’s economic plight incomparably worse. Her Workers’ Party (PT) is a
prime mover behind a gargantuan bribery scheme centred on Petrobras, the
state-controlled oil company, which channelled money from contractors to
politicians and parties. Although Ms Rousseff has not been personally
implicated in the wrongdoing, she tried to shield her predecessor as president,
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from prosecution.
What is
alarming is that those who are working for her removal are in many ways worse.
If the Senate votes to put her on trial, probably by mid-May, Ms Rousseff will
have to step aside for up to 180 days. The vice-president, Michel Temer, who
comes from a different party, will take over and serve out her term if the
Senate removes her from office (seearticle). Mr Temer may provide short-term
economic relief. Unlike the hapless Ms Rousseff, he knows how to get things
done in Brasília and his Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB) is
friendlier to business than the PT.
But the PMDB is hopelessly
compromised, too. One of its leaders is the speaker of the lower house, Eduardo
Cunha, who presided over Sunday’s six-hour impeachment spectacle and has
himself been charged by the supreme court with taking bribes through the Petrobras
scheme. In announcing their “no” votes, some of Ms Rousseff’s allies denounced
Mr Cunha as a “gangster” and a “thief”.
The taint of corruption is spread
across many Brazilian parties. Of the 21 deputies under investigation in the
Petrobras affair, 16 voted for Ms Rousseff’s impeachment. About 60% of
congressmen face accusations of criminal wrongdoing.
There are no quick ways of putting
this right. The roots of Brazil’s political dysfunction go back to the
slave-based economy of the 19th century, to dictatorship in the 20th and to a
flawed electoral system that both makes campaigns ruinously expensive and also
shields politicians from account.
In the short run, impeachment will
not fix this. The charge that is the basis for trying Ms Rousseff—that she manipulated
accounts last year to make the fiscal deficit look smaller than it was—is so
minor that just a handful of congressmen bothered to mention it in their
ten-second tirades. If Ms Rousseff is ousted on a technicality, Mr Temer will
struggle to be seen as a legitimate president by the large minority of
Brazilians who still back Ms Rousseff.
In any other country, such a
cocktail of economic decline and political conflict might be combustible. Yet
Brazil has remarkable reserves of tolerance. Divided as they are over the
rights and wrongs of impeachment, Brazilians have kept their anger in check.
The past three decades suggest that theirs is a country which can endure a
crisis without resorting to coups or collapses. And here, perhaps, is a shred
of hope.
The fact that the Petrobras
scandal has ensnared some of the country’s most powerful politicians and
businessmen is a sign that some institutions, especially those that enforce the
law, are maturing. One reason politicians are in such trouble is that a new,
better-educated and more assertive middle class refused to put up with their
impunity. Some of the statutes now being used to put away miscreants were
enacted by Ms Rousseff’s government.
One way of capturing this spirit
would be for the country to hold fresh elections. A new president might have a
mandate to embark on reforms that have eluded governments for decades. Voters
also deserve a chance to rid themselves of the entire corruption-infested
Congress. Only new leaders and new legislators can undertake the fundamental
reforms that Brazil needs, in particular an overhaul of the corruption-prone
political system and of uncontrolled public spending, which pushes up debt and
hobbles growth.
Second best
True enough, the path to renewal
through the ballot box is strewn with obstacles. Given its record, Congress is
unlikely to pass the constitutional amendment required to dissolve itself and
hold an early general election. The electoral tribunal could order a new
presidential ballot, on the ground that Petrobras bribe money helped finance
the re-election of Ms Rousseff and Mr Temer in 2014. But that is far from
certain.
There is thus a good chance that
Brazil will be condemned to muddle on under the current generation of
discredited leaders. Its voters should not forget this moment. Because, in the
end, they will have a chance to go to the polls—and they should use it to vote
for something better.
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