#Being at about to leave the Brazilian Presidency

#Being at about to leave the Brazilian Presidency
(Forbes) Brazil Says Goodbye To Olympics,
Prepares Same For President Dilma

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August 21 2016

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Brazil Says Goodbye To Olympics, Prepares Same For President Dilma

Kenneth Rapoza ,

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I cover business and investing in emerging markets.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Suspended Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, during the reading of her letter to the Brazilian people and senators, at Alvorada Palace in Brasilia, on August 16, 2016. The final phase of the impeachment process against Rousseff will begin in the Brazilian senate on August 25.  (Photo by ANDRESSA ANHOLETE/AFP/Getty Images)

Adeus or good riddance? That depends on who you ask.

Barring green pools, a phony police robbery, and an Olympic Committee official caught in a ticket scalping scandal that cost him his job, the summer Olympics went off largely without a hitch in Rio de Janeiro. The disaster the media unanimously forecast never panned out. Athletes weren’t swarmed with zika vector mosquitoes, and Rio’s penchant for petty crime and theft wasn’t beyond the usual day-in-the-life in Brazil’s most iconic city.

Alas, the last fireworks have been fired. The star athletes are packed up and heading home. With that, the country is saying goodbye to an era. Two eras, to be exact. The era of Brazil hosting two massive world sporting events — FIFA World Cup soccer in 2014 and this year’s summer Olympics — and the era of the Workers’ Party that brought them there. This week marks the final act of president Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s first first lady president and the second sitting executive to be impeached since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985.

Unless Tinkerbell sweeps in with pixie dust and sprinkles it all over the Senate, Dilma’s case is unlikely to fly. She will be impeached and her vice president Michel Temer of the Democratic Movement Party will be sworn in as the official president of Brazil before the month is through. He will represent Brazil at the G-20 meeting in China, unless there is some shocking conclusion to this week’s Senate hearing. Let’s give that shocking conclusion a 10% chance of occurring.

Dilma’s ouster marks the end of 14 years of Workers’ Party rule, a left-of-center party many believe she helped destroy by taking it even further to the left. In fact, of the dozens of politicians once running under the Workers’ Party banner for the October municipal elections, nearly half have switched parties. In São Paulo state, 33% of mayors up for election switched parties to avoid affiliation with her. Twenty eight percent of Workers’ Party politicians running for local congress have left the party. The same holds nationwide.

Dilma’s exit brings up a lot of emotions in Brazil. In the U.S., one might compare it to a debate between MSNBC and Fox News, the Red Sox versus the Yankees, Tom Brady versus Roger Goodell. One side is never going to switch to the other, no matter how striking the evidence.

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Plots to remove Dilma began in late 2015. Two things were happening at the time: first, the massive Petrobras contract rigging and bribery scandal was eating into Dilma’s popularity. She was elected with just over 52% of the vote, but her popularity collapsed as soon as her second term began.

Second, the Senate and the Audit Court of Brazil (TCU) were looking into her budget. In short, Dilma was fudging the numbers to make it appear that she would meet the fiscal targets required by law. She took money from public banks in 2014 to fund social welfare programs, something the opposition says was a way for her to buy votes and mask a deteriorating economy. Politics aside, however, TCU found that she broke the fiscal responsibility law in 2014 and then did so again in 2015, only to a lesser extent despite court warnings.

Dilma also issued a number of executive decrees to authorize spending in July and August 2015, breaching federal spending limits. According to Brazil’s fiscal responsibility laws, a president cannot perform credit transactions by dipping into the coffers of public banks without congressional approval.

An overview of the closing ceremony of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games at the Maracana stadium in Rio de Janeiro on August 21, 2016.  Brazil is saying goodbye to an era: the end of years of preparing for and hosting two major worldwide events, and preparing to oust its second president since the military dictatorship. When Dilma is removed, it will market the end of 14 years of Workers’  Party rule. (Photo by ANTONIN THUILLIER/AFP/Getty Images)

The argument from Dilma’s camp is that she is not the first to do such things. While that is true, that argument is a lot like asking a police officer why you never got a speeding ticket for going 35 in a 25 miles per hour school zone, but got one for going 60.

The Public Prosecutors Office argues that those credit transactions from the public banks do not constitute a breach of the fiscal responsibility rules and is therefore not an impeachable offense. Both the TCU and the Public Prosecutor’s views are legal opinions that will be used by the Senate in this week’s trial.

But let’s face it, all impeachments are political trials. The Senate is the final judge and jury. The last time the Senate ruled on whether to go ahead with the trial, 59 out of 81 senators said “go for it”. They only needed 41. The same number is likely to vote for Dilma’s impeachment this month.

In other words, Dilma does not stand a chance.

Fans, get on your hands and knees and pray to the Brazilian God that has seemingly gone absent without leave — maybe he’s helping out the Argentinians? Because unless there’s a fairy tale ending in the works, the deck is stacked against her. If it is a mere technicality in the budget law that is leading to her impeachment, then it is also a mere technicality on behalf of Dilma’s lawyers who have a yeoman’s task to counterpoint and save her from a 10 years ban from politics. It’s a Sisyphus tale really. Sisyphus, the king of Ephyra, was punished by the Greek gods for his self-serving craftiness and deceitfulness by being forced to roll a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down.

If Dilma was backed by a strong economy, and if there was no such thing as the multi-billion dollar Petrobras scandal — a scandal she oversaw to some extent up until 2010 as Chairwoman of the Board of Directors of the oil firm — then none of this would be happening. No one would care about her using loans from Banco do Brasil and Caixa Economica Federal to fill budget holes.

Sadly for Dilma, that is not the case. Her breach, however egregious, is the framework that surrounds the entire impeachment, as sinister and conspiratorial and conniving as it is.

A savvy congressman named Eduardo Cunha of Temer’s Democratic Movement Party got the ball rolling against her late last year. He asked congress to give him anything they could find on Dilma in order to impeach her within the legal boundaries set by the Constitution. He was given dozens of reasons, but the fiscal law breach stood out. She was impeached in the lower house on April 17, a house overrun with Cunha supporters, and lorded over by the man who — only three months later — was basically forced to resign from his post because of charges of receiving bribes by Petrobras contractors.

Dilma faces a similar fate.

So as the week begins, Brazil prepares for another goodbye beyond the Olympics.  According to pollsters at Ibope in July, over 70% of the 2,000 Brazilians asked to take their “temperature” on the Olympics said they were “cold”.  Another polling firm, Datafolha, had Dilma’s approval rating at just around 10% in her last weeks as president. Given those numbers, it’s probably more of a good riddance.

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Brazil Turmoil: President Dilma's Road To Impeachment

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