The Ousting of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff Constitutes a Coup

In Brazil, as in the United States, unpopular or incompetent presidents cannot be forced to resign by a simple "no confidence" vote by the legislature.

An impeachment process is a juridical-political trial reserved for a crime of responsibility attributed to the president. But the ousting of a president as the sole result of a shift in the political balance of a coalition government can only be seen as a parliamentary coup.

The impeachment process of President Dilma Rousseff started as a retaliation by the speaker of Brazil’s lower house of Congress, Eduardo Cunha, indicted for taking as much as $40 million in a kickback scheme at the state-owned oil company Petrobras. Cunha, whose name is also tied to the Panama Papers, initiated the impeachment process shortly after a public announcement by government allies that they would not stop investigations in the Congressional ethics committee that could lead to his removal.

In the absence of any evidence on Rousseff's involvement in corruption schemes, Cunha based his accusations on two different charges of poor administration of public resources.

The first focuses on delays in transferring resources to public banks. The funds for payment of social benefits were held back, presumably to hide the fiscal deficit. These delays have happened for years, but in 2014, fiscal regulators condemned the practice based on its higher frequency and length. The government responded to the new jurisprudence by changing its behavior in 2015.

The second accusation is about budgetary decrees allegedly incompatible with the 2015 fiscal target. Amid dramatic budget cuts, such decrees have only reassigned spending limits in particular policies, without allowing for a total increase in each ministry's expenditures.

None of these accusations, which the news media has purposefully kept unknown to the majority of Brazilians, is sufficient to support a crime of responsibility. Lawmakers aiming to avoid corruption charges, political leaders looking for shortcuts to power, and representatives of the corporate sector with well-known financial interests, are taking advantage of the genuine concerns of the population when it comes to systemic corruption.

Hopefully the government will have learned from this dreadful episode that yielding to pressures from the same forces who are now supporting the coup does not pave the way for political stability or the country's economic recovery.

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