Rousseff moots Olympic ‘truce’ on impeachment

Dilma Rousseff tried to make it look like business as usual on Friday with a visit to the Rio Olympics site, but time is running out for the Brazilian president ahead of an impeachment vote.
The trip to Rio, where she inaugurated the Olympic swimming centre, was a bittersweet occasion for a president who no longer knows if she’ll even be in power when the Games kick off on August 5.
The Olympics, the first staged in South America, were awarded back in 2009 when Brazil was an emerging markets high flier and Rousseff’s leftist mentor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, was one of the most popular presidents in the world.
Now Rousseff is fighting for her political life ahead of an impeachment vote in Congress while ex-president Lula faces corruption charges.
She cancelled a trip to Greece to see the lighting of the Olympic flame on April 21, Greek officials said on Friday.
Rousseff stood at the side of the sparkling Olympic pool, calling for “dialogue” and saying that Rio’s staging of the Games showed what Brazil could do when it was united.
“This is a special moment, a symbol and an example of Brazil of what it is possible to do when good people unite for the good of the Brazilian people,” she said.
After, she opened a new public housing project, part of the signature My House, My Life program, a centrepiece of her Workers’ Party attempt to tackle massive inequality and poverty in Brazil.
The crowd cheered and chanted as a beaming Rousseff shook hands with well-wishers - a rare sight for a deeply unpopular president who often appears to lack the common touch.
Rousseff was due to return to a grimmer reality by the end of the day in the capital Brasilia, where a congressional commission is preparing to vote tomorrow on whether to recommend her removal from office.
A week later comes a vote by the lower house of Congress, where a two-thirds majority would send Rousseff to a full impeachment trial in the Senate.
Rousseff is accused of breaking the law by juggling government accounts to disguise the depth of budget shortfalls during her 2014 re-election.
She argues that this relatively technical accusation does not amount to an impeachable offense.
However, momentum for her removal is being fuelled by a massive recession, political paralysis and a sprawling corruption scandal that together have reduced the Rousseff government’s approval rating to around 10%.
Rousseff’s opponents sense that the country’s first female president, a former Marxist guerrilla tortured under a 1964-1985 military dictatorship, is as good as finished.
“We are living in a situation where the government does not govern and the president of the republic is no longer the president,” said Moreira Franco, a former minister from the centrist PMDB party which was until recently allied with the Workers’ Party but now supports impeachment.
Rousseff, who calls the impeachment a coup attempt, still hopes to engineer a Houdini-like escape from her predicament.
Latest counts indicated that the result in the lower house is on a knife-edge.
The respected Datafolha polling organization said that 60% of deputies are pro-impeachment, representing the equivalent of 308 out of the 513, when a total of 342 are needed to pass the measure - or 172 to defeat it.
According to the poll, 18% of deputies are still undecided, meaning they currently hold the crucial votes.
O Estadao newspaper’s estimate, based on individual head counts, showed 284 in favour and 114 against, with 63 saying they were undecided and 52 not answering.
As Brazilians look for ways out of the crisis, one theory gaining support is that the trauma of impeachment could be avoided through snap elections to replace the president and the entire Congress.
Rousseff has indicated that she might support the idea, which would require a constitutional amendment.
Lula, who founded the Workers’ Party and retains huge influence on the left, is co-ordinating the intense behind-the-scenes haggling to secure those votes.
But the veteran wheeler and dealer faces his own potential downfall.
He is accused of money laundering in a case linked to a gargantuan embezzlement and bribery scheme at state oil company Petrobras which has already seen dozens of high ranking politicians and executives snared by prosecutors.
Lula says the case is a politicized fabrication, but now he and Rousseff are also both in trouble for allegedly trying to obstruct prosecutors.