Dilma Rousseff

First term

Rousseff outlined a domestic agenda that focused on the maintenance of economic stability, poverty eradication, political reform, tax reform, and job creation. Her foreign policy stressed human rights, multilateralism, peace, and nonintervention. In August 2011 she launched a new industrial policy, “Larger Brazil,” that included “buy Brazilian” provisions and tax cuts for industry. In November she signed a landmark law that established a truth commission to investigate the disappearances and human rights abuses during military rule.

Throughout 2011 Rousseff’s administration faced accusations of corruption. By the end of 2011, investigations into multiple allegations of corruption and the possibility of congressional inquiries had led to the resignation of five cabinet ministers, all holdovers from the Lula administration. In November 2012 six more Brazilian government officials were arrested on charges of influence peddling and corruption. Rousseff fired two of them. Meanwhile, the trial of the largest political corruption scandal in Brazilian history was winding down. The case, dubbed the mensalão (“big monthly bribe”), involved a scheme to bribe members of the Chamber of Deputies, and it was alleged that Lula had been involved.

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All this occurred as the Brazilian economy cooled down considerably, with the GDP slipping from a growth rate of about 7.5 percent in 2010 to 1.0 percent in 2012. In response the central bank pursued an aggressive policy of interest-rate reduction and lowered the reserve requirement for Brazilian banks, which injected liquidity into the economy, helping to keep the unemployment rate low and buoying Rousseff’s popularity. In September 2012, under pressure from industry to cut the costs of electricity, Rousseff announced a “provisional measure” that created a mechanism to reduce energy prices by an average of about 20 percent and renewed for up to 30 years the concessions from electricity plants set to expire in 2015–17.

Brazil’s political landscape was transformed by massive, sometimes violent street protests that began in São Paulo in June 2013 and spread throughout the country. The demonstrations were staged mainly by a growing middle class that was increasingly anxious about government corruption, the country’s disappointing economic performance, and poor delivery of public services—especially in light of the billions spent by the government on infrastructure as well as on building and upgrading stadiums for the football (soccer) World Cup competition that the country would host in 2014 and the Summer Olympic Games that Rio de Janeiro was scheduled to host in 2016. Rousseff’s response to the unrest included a controversial plan to remedy Brazil’s shortage of physicians by bringing in foreign doctors, especially from Cuba. The demonstrations contributed to a drop in Rousseff’s approval rating from 65 percent to 30 percent at one point during 2013.

In September 2013, revelations by former Central Intelligence Agency analyst Edward Snowden of U.S. intelligence monitoring of emails of Rousseff, her fellow citizens, and Petrobras led to the postponement of what would have been the first state visit by a Brazilian leader to Washington in more than 18 years, straining a relationship that both countries had worked hard to improve. Speaking at the United Nations at the end of September, Rousseff openly criticized the U.S. spying activities and proposed the creation of a UN-based regulatory framework for the Internet.

As the staging of the World Cup itself went largely according to plan, Rousseff’s popularity rebounded. The Brazilian team did Rousseff no favors, however, when it suffered arguably the worst loss in the country’s illustrious World Cup history, falling to Germany 7–1 in a semifinal match and turning the attention of the football-crazy country back to its social and economic ills. (The Brazilian economy had slid into recession at the beginning of 2014.) Nevertheless, Rousseff appeared to have a solid lead in the preference polling for the upcoming first round of presidential elections—until the Brazilian Socialist Party candidate, Eduardo Campos, died in a plane crash in August. He was replaced by his running mate, green activist Marina Silva, whose candidacy seemed to resonate strongly with the electorate. Moreover, with the October 5 election approaching, Brazil refused to join more than 150 other countries in signing an anti-deforestation pledge at the climate-change summit in New York City in September, claiming that the pledge had been drafted without Brazilian participation.

Rousseff responded aggressively to Silva’s challenge with one of the most negative campaigns in the country’s recent electoral history. In the process Rousseff won the first round of voting with about 42 percent of the vote (shy of the 50 percent necessary to prevent a second round) and derailed the candidacy of Silva, who finished with just 21 percent. Rousseff faced a formidable challenge in the October 26 runoff, however, from the Brazilian Social Democratic Party candidate, pro-business center-right former Minas Gerais governor Aécio Neves, who surged in the final weeks of the campaign to capture some 34 percent of the vote. Despite Silva’s endorsement of Neves, Rousseff triumphed in the runoff to win a second term, capturing more than 51 percent of the vote in contrast to more than 48 percent for Neves.

Second term and impeachment

Rousseff’s second term got off to a horrible start, as the economy continued to worsen and a new scandal swelled to exceed the impact of the mensalão affair. By March 2015 dozens of high-level businesspeople and politicians had been indicted as part of a widespread investigation alleging that many millions of dollars had been kicked back to Petrobras officials, the PT and its members, and members of the PT’s coalition partner, the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB), by prominent Brazilian corporations, including a cartel of construction companies, in return for contracts with Petrobras (see Petrobras scandal). Although Rousseff had served as chair of Petrobras for a period that largely overlapped with the alleged kickbacks, an investigation by the attorney general cleared her of any wrongdoing. Many Brazilians, however, doubted that she could have been ignorant of those goings-on. Huge anti-government and anti-scandal demonstrations took place in São Paulo and across the country on March 15, and Rousseff’s approval rating plummeted to 13 percent. On April 12 massive demonstrations were again staged throughout Brazil. Though the crowds were smaller than those in March—the total number of demonstrators was estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands rather than March’s million or so demonstrators—the focus was on a call for Rousseff’s impeachment.

Central to the efforts to impeach Rousseff were accusations that she had overseen the misuse of state bank funds to mask budget deficits in the run-up to the 2014 presidential election. In the meantime Brazil’s economy remained mired in recession, the GDP having contracted by some 3.7 percent in 2015, with the value of the real tumbling and business confidence eroding. Some observers characterized the economic crisis as the country’s worst since the turn of the 20th century, and the rapidly growing body of Rousseff’s critics was quick to blame the economic policies of the president.

Her hopes of pushing austerity measures through the legislature and winning public support for them were stymied by the ever-growing Petrobras scandal, the multiplying tentacles of which ensnared Lula in March 2016. Early in that month police raided the home of Rousseff’s mentor and briefly held him for questioning. Roughly a week later prosecutors charged Lula with money laundering, related to his ties to a huge construction company, for having allegedly hidden his ownership of a seaside luxury apartment. Having made a show of literally standing beside Lula following his initial questioning, Rousseff made an even bigger demonstration of her support when she appointed him her chief of staff only days after he had been charged. As a member of the cabinet, Lula, no longer legally subject to prosecution by a federal court, could be tried only by the Supreme Court. Among those who saw the appointment as Rousseff’s attempt to protect Lula from prosecution was a federal judge who both blocked Lula’s appointment and released the transcript of a wiretapped phone conversation between Rousseff and Lula, which, it was argued, indicated that Rousseff was indeed appointing Lula as a precautionary measure for him.

With the outcry for Rousseff’s impeachment swelling in the halls of government and on the streets (according to some estimates, more than a million Brazilians across the country participated in anti-government demonstrations on March 13), the PT’s principal partner in the ruling coalition, the PMDB, withdrew from the government at the end of March, raising the possibility that it might be followed out by smaller members of the coalition. Those departures increased the likelihood that there would not be enough support left for Rousseff in the Chamber of Deputies to prevent the two-thirds majority required to send the embattled president before the Senate for an impeachment trial. Determined to remain in office, Rousseff characterized the efforts to oust her as a coup. All of this occurred against a backdrop in which hundreds of the members of Brazil’s Congress faced accusations of malfeasance, including the speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, the PMDB’s Eduardo Cunha, who had been formally charged with corruption and money laundering. After three days of intense debate, on the evening of April 17 the 513-seat Chamber of Deputies voted to move forward with the impeachment procedure, with 367 deputies voting for impeachment (significantly more than the 342 votes required).

In early May, as the Senate prepared to vote on whether to proceed with impeachment, events took another dramatic turn. First, the Supreme Court ordered that Cunha be removed as speaker for allegedly having obstructed the investigation into corruption charges against him. Then, on May 9, Cunha’s replacement as speaker, Waldir Maranhão (also under investigation for alleged involvement in the Petrobras scandal), annulled the earlier impeachment vote by the Chamber of Deputies, citing irregularities that had occurred during the session in which the vote was taken. A day later, with senators saying that they would proceed with their vote anyway, Maranhão reversed his decision. In the meantime Rousseff’s 11th-hour appeal to the Supreme Court to stop the impeachment proceedings also came up empty-handed.

Early in the morning of May 12, 2016, after an all-night debate, the Brazilian Senate voted 55 to 22 to suspend Rousseff and to consider impeachment. Vice Pres. Michel Temer of the PMDB, a former ally of Rousseff, became acting president. On August 10 the Senate voted 59–21 to hold an impeachment trial, at the end of which a two-thirds majority vote would be necessary for conviction and permanent removal from office. In the event of conviction, Temer would serve the remainder of Rousseff’s term, ending in January 2019.

The impeachment trial began on August 25. On August 29 Rousseff began her testimony before the Senate with an impassioned statement (called the best speech of her career by some observers) in which she defended her actions regarding the budget, saying that she had done nothing that previous Brazilian presidents had not already done. She also stood by the egalitarian achievements of the Workers’ Party and warned that the administration of Temer—whose cabinet, she noted, had no women or people of color in it—would limit public spending and defend the interests of the wealthy elite. “I don’t fight for my mandate out of vanity or attachment to power,” Rousseff said. “I fight for democracy, for truth, and for justice. I fight for the people of my country and their well-being.”

Rousseff also responded to questions from senators for 14 hours. The next day, in Rousseff’s absence, the Senate debated her fate into the wee hours of August 31. Later that day the Senate voted 61–20 to remove Rousseff from office. The Senate then held a separate vote on whether to bar her from holding public office for eight years; that measure failed to pass, allowing her to retain her political rights. The decision to separate the votes proved controversial. “There is no constitutional provision to allow for one to vote for the loss of office, and another for the disqualification for the exercise of public function,” Sen. Alvaro Dias stated. Many critics argued that the second vote was unconstitutional and that impeachment under Brazilian law should entail an automatic eight-year ban from running for or holding public office. Nevertheless, Rousseff ran for a seat in the Senate two years after her impeachment but was defeated by a lesser-known candidate.