BRASILIA (Reuters) – Brazil’s largest opposition party is divided over how strongly to back a new interim government if it succeeds in having President Dilma Rousseff stripped of office, as it eyes a run at the presidency in 2018, senior members said yesterday.
The Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) will support a government led by Vice President Michel Temer from the aisles of Congress if the left-leaning Rousseff is unseated next month but the party is split over whether to join his cabinet.
The Senate was due to meet later yesterday to pick a 21-member committee that will report back on whether to put Rousseff on trial in the upper house on charges of deliberately breaking budget laws to boost her reelection bid in 2014.
The lower house voted this month there were grounds for a trial. If the Senate agrees to put her on trial in a vote on May 12, as expected, Rousseff will immediately be suspended from office for the period of the proceedings. She denies any wrongdoing.
Temer, whose Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) quit the government last month, is preparing to govern. Former central bank governor Henrique Meirelles is emerging as the top candidate to become finance minister, a source familiar with the talks told Reuters.
Investors are looking to Temer to restore confidence in Latin America’s largest economy. Brazil was stripped of its coveted investment grade credit rating in December amid the worst recession in decades and an acute fiscal crisis.
Business leaders are pressing the PSDB to join Temer to help restore credibility in economic policy, but many inside the party are wary of the risks in terms of future elections of failing to pull the country out of its worst recession since the 1930s.
Party leader Aecio Neves, who narrowly lost to Rousseff in 2014 and is expected to run again in 2018, said last week that he does not want party members to accept ministerial positions in a Temer cabinet.
However, Senator Jose Serra, a successful former health minister who has his own presidential ambitions, is keen to be a minister and the vice president wants him in, said lawmaker Bruno Araujo, leader of the PSDB in the lower house.
