Brazil leader Rousseff begins her long goodbye
What you need to know:
On May 11 or 12 the Senate is expected to vote to open an impeachment trial on charges that Rousseff illegally manipulated government accounts.
She would be automatically suspended and replaced by Vice President Michel Temer.
A definitive Senate vote on Rousseff’s fate could take months more, but unless she was cleared, she would never come back.
RIO DE JANEIRO, Monday
Dilma Rousseff greets the Olympic flame in Brazil on Tuesday, but the pomp and ceremony will seem empty to a president likely to be suspended from office just a week later.
The arrival of the flame in Brasilia from an ancient Greek temple via Switzerland will trigger a three-month countdown to the Rio de Janeiro Olympics and Brazil’s big chance to shine on the global stage.
But the supposedly joyful occasion coincides with the Latin American giant’s plunge into a political furnace, with Rousseff facing impeachment — and claiming to be the victim of a coup d’etat.
That means the choreographed events for the torch in the capital could be one of the 68-year-old leftist leader’s last major public appearances.
On May 11 or 12 the Senate is expected to vote to open an impeachment trial on charges that Rousseff illegally manipulated government accounts.
She would be automatically suspended and replaced by Vice President Michel Temer, the head of Brazil’s main center-right party and once a coalition ally of Rousseff before — in her words — turning “traitor.”
A definitive Senate vote on Rousseff’s fate could take months more, but unless she was cleared, she would never come back and her nemesis would stay in power until the next scheduled elections in 2018.
On Sunday, Rousseff railed against “the coup” and told union supporters of her Workers’ Party that she would “fight to the end.”
However, with the Senate vote to suspend her looking near certain, she appears resigned — at the very minimum — to the humiliating prospect of having to abandon her executive offices, called the Palacio do Planalto, in just over a week.
“She has ordered the drawers to be cleaned out,” Folha daily said Sunday.
And it isn’t just filing cabinets that will be looking for a new home. Her Workers’ Party ministers and what Folha calls “a sea” of government employees are likely soon to be sending out job resumes.
