Brazilian acting President Michel Temer
gestures during the inauguration
ceremony of the new ministers at
Planalto Palace, in Brasilia, on May 12,
2016.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was
suspended Thursday to face an
impeachment trial, ceding power to her
vice president-turned-enemy Michel
Temer, who quickly pivoted toward a
more business-friendly government,
naming a cabinet chosen to calm the
markets after a paralyzing impeachment
battle and steer the country out of its
worst recession in decades.
/ AFP PHOTO / EVARISTO SA /
Brazil’s acting president Michel Temer
vowed Friday to get Latin America’s
largest economy back on track after a
cascade of crises put an end to 13 years
of leftist rule.
Temer presided over the first meeting
of his new business-friendly cabinet,
setting out its priorities: creating a
leaner government, balancing finances
to address a crippling recession, and
rooting out the corruption that a huge
judicial probe has uncovered at the
highest levels of Brazilian politics and
business.
“I want to get the country back on the
rails,” Temer told weekly magazine
Epoca in his first interview as president
after taking over from suspended
predecessor Dilma Rousseff, who faces
an impeachment trial in the Senate.
Temer’s chief of staff, Eliseu Padilha,
said the new government faced a
challenging to-do list.
“We’re living through the worst
economic crisis in the history of Brazil,”
he told a press conference.
The solution, he said, is “out with
corruption and in with efficiency.”
Finance Minister Henrique Meirelles,
the man tasked with restoring
confidence in Brazil’s economy, said his
priority would be cutting spending.
He pledged not to cut the popular
social programs launched under the
sidelined Workers’ Party (PT) —
initiatives credited with helping lift tens
of millions of people out of poverty —
as long as beneficiaries really need
them.
But he warned: “Maintaining a social
program doesn’t mean maintaining the
misuse of a social program.”
– Leadership limbo –
Temer asked for patience as his team
works to turn around an economy stuck
in its worst recession in decades.
“I’m not going to be able to work
miracles in two years,” he said.
That timeframe belies the strange
leadership limbo in which Brazil finds
itself pending an impeachment trial
that could last up to six months.
Political analysts say Rousseff will likely
be removed from office for good by a
two-thirds vote in the Senate — and
Temer is clearly betting he will hold
power until the next presidential
election in 2018.
But for now he is stuck coexisting with
his running mate-turned-enemy, who is
holed up in the presidential residence
planning her defense and attacking the
new government.
Underlining the tension in the corridors
of power, workers began removing
portraits of Rousseff from the
presidential palace Friday, only to be
told to put them back because, as
Temer himself said, Rousseff is still
technically president.
– Cabinet controversy –
Temer faces many of the same
stumbling blocks as his predecessor —
plus a few of his own.
Political analysts warned his
honeymoon may not even last until he
opens the Olympic Games in Rio de
Janeiro on August 5, South America’s
first.
Temer is just about as disliked as the
deeply unpopular Rousseff. A recent
poll found he would receive just two
percent of the vote in a presidential
election.
The acting president will also face a
deeply hostile left, resentful over what
it calls the “coup” against Brazil’s first
woman president.
Temer stoked opponents’ outrage with
his cabinet appointments: all 23 of his
ministers are white men.
“We tried to search for women but
because of the timetable… it was not
possible,” Padilha said.
Another controversy erupted over the
decision to axe the culture ministry and
lump it together with education.
The minister who got the portfolio,
Mendonca Filho, was raucously booed
by culture ministry employees when he
went to address them.
Some held signs reading “Yes to
culture, no to coups” and “We don’t
recognize the putschist government.”
The merger of the two ministries was
also attacked in an open letter from an
association of well-known artists
including renowned singers Chico
Buarque, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto
Gil — who was himself culture minister
from 2003 to 2008.
– Vulnerable to scandal –
Temer is also vulnerable to the swirling
scandal at state oil company Petrobras,
which has snared top members of both
his party, the PMDB, and Rousseff’s PT.
Temer, 75, is not under investigation
himself. But three of his ministers are,
and witnesses have implicated several
others.
Opponents have warned that Temer
could try to choke off the probe.
Those suspicions were fueled late
Thursday when the Supreme Court
suspended its decision to open an
investigation into Senator Aecio Neves,
the leader of the center-right PSDB
party and a key Temer ally.
Rousseff, a one-time Marxist guerrilla
tortured under Brazil’s military
dictatorship in the 1970s, has vowed
not to go quietly.
“Today Brazil has an interim,
illegitimate government and a president
elected by 54 million people,” she told
journalists.
“We will fight to come back.”
While most Latin American leaders
watched the crisis unfold with little
comment, the leftist governments of
Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua
criticized Rousseff’s ouster.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro
late Friday decried the “coup d’etat”
against Rousseff, and said that he called
his ambassador in “to evaluate this
painful page in the history of Brazil.”
Venezuela takes over the rotating
presidency of Mercosur in one month,
and Maduro warned that Rousseff’s
ouster “will affect” the South American
trade bloc, without giving specifics.
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