Development: On 2 August Senator Antonio Anastasia, the head of the committee in Brazil’s federal senate tasked with processing the impeachment of suspended president Dilma Rousseff, delivered a 440-page report to the committee in which he concluded that there was sufficient evidence for Rousseff to be subjected to an impeachment trial by the senate.
Significance: The impeachment committee will vote on the Anastasia report in the coming days. The vote is non-binding, but invariably it will send a strong message to the senate’s plenary. The plenary is expected to hold its vote early next week, with just a simple majority needed to proceed with the impeachment trial. That would be followed by a final trial session sometime in late August, overseen by the president of the supreme court (STF). Rousseff’s fate appears sealed. Over two thirds of the 81 senators are believed to be in favour of impeachment, amid a sense that the country needs to move forward from its current unprecedented political and economic crisis. Yet Rousseff still maintains she is the victim of a political conspiracy and that history will absolve her.
- Anastasia, a member of the main opposition Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB), said the accusations against Rousseff were “undeniable”. Rousseff has been charged with breaching fiscal rules by borrowing from state banks to cover budget gaps without informing the national congress, thereby allowing for some additional spending flexibility ahead of the October 2015 general elections (in which Rousseff was re-elected for a second term and her Partido dos Trabalhadores for a fourth consecutive government term).
- “What we found was an expansive spending policy that was not fiscally sustainable and lacked transparency, with operations that bypassed congress and did not follow good practices of budget management”, Anastasia’s report states. Under Brazil’s constitution, the president bears ultimate responsibility for breaches of the fiscal rules.
- Rousseff, suspended on 12 May, said in her submitted written defence that her administration did no more or no less than previous governments, and that the ‘creative accounting’ methods it employed were “routine acts of budgetary management”. She has called the impeachment proceedings “a farce” and believes herself a victim of a conservative conspiracy.
Looking Ahead: The final trial session, expected to take about a week, has already been set to start on 29 August, but may in fact begin on 26 August. Rousseff’s interim replacement, her former vice-president Michel Temer, has denied exerting pressure for an earlier trial so that he can attend the ‘G-20’ summit in China in early September with his position legitimised.
