Brazil's president Dilma Rousseff must face impeachment proceedings in revenge for her party's decision to back efforts to remove the head of the lower house of congress over corruption allegations.
Once her Workers Party signalled that it would vote to oust Eduardo Cunha, the president of the chamber of deputies called a press conference on Wednesday evening to announce he would formally accept a petition to remove Ms Rousseff from office.
The move is the most dramatic twist yet in the deepening political crisis provoked by the sprawling scandal at oil giant Petrobras and comes at a time when Ms Rousseff is deeply unpopular and with little political support thanks to her mismanagement of the country's worst recession in decades.
Wednesday's drama was the culmination of days of mounting tension in Brasília that saw Mr Cunha reportedly blackmail the president, warning that if her party voted against him he would immediately introduce an impeachment request onto the floor of the house.
In response the presidential palace lobbied her party’s three deputies on the chamber’s ethics committee to save Mr Cunha. But already fearful of an electoral meltdown in next year’s mid-term elections over the party’s corruption, and facing pressure from party militants outraged at the thoughts of the party saving one of Brazil’s most corrupt and reactionary politicians, Workers Party president Rui Falcão publically opposed Ms Rousseff’s wishes and came down in favour of ousting Mr Cunha despite his threat of retaliation.
Caught in the middle, the three Workers Party deputies on the committee were explicit about the blackmail being employed by Mr Cunha to secure their support. “We’re voting not with a knife against of throat but a machine-gun, everyone knows that Cunha works with this weapon,” said deputy Zé Geraldo.
Bribes accusations
In the end the three deputies decided to vote to oust Mr Cunha, who is accused of receiving millions of dollars in bribes from Petrobras contractors and lying to a house committee about holding the money in Swiss bank accounts.
Once the Workers Party made its position clear Mr Cunha did not even wait for the vote by the ethics committee before announcing he would move for impeachment. The process against the president was filed by jurists led by human rights activist and former Workers Party member Hélio Bicudo. They are demanding her removal over illegal accounting practices that state auditors say her administration used to hide a gaping hole in the public accounts.
In a brief televised statement Ms Rousseff said she was “indignant” at the move and said her administration had never practised “illicit acts”. She also attacked Mr Cunha personally, saying that she had never held bank accounts offshore or hidden part of her personal wealth.
She must now muster 171 votes in the lower house to prevent an impeachment motion winning the necessary two-thirds support that would send her forward for trial in the senate. Ms Rousseff’s support is leaking away as corruption scandals and the economic crisis take their toll.
The last Brazilian president impeached was Fernando Collor in 1992, for corruption.
