It is worth taking account of the difficulties being experienced by our neighhbour Brazil, as President Dilma Rousseff continues into her second term of office. For now she is confronting challenges on both the political and economic fronts, soon after her re-election in November of last year.
In a sense, the President, having come to terms with a relatively narrow re-election victory of 51.6% to 48.4%, must have anticipated that her opponents would have been emboldened, and would seek to take advantage of any challenges to her administration on both the economic and political fronts. Yet her comment on the morrow of her victory, that “close outcomes trigger results more quickly than ample victories” seems now, less than a year since the elections, not to have been justified, as protests against alleged corruption, as well as a current economic slowdown challenge her on all sides.
Of course, the major challenge of governmental corruption is based on allegations made before the elections, claims being made in respect of the misappropriation of financial resources of the petroleum company Petrobras, of which the president was then chairperson, during the regime of then President Lula.
Formal investigations have raised the spectre of her removal from office, on the precedent of the move to impeach a former president, Fernando Collor de Mello in 1992, though there have been, at least as yet, no direct charges against her. But she must already now be sensitive to the meaning of very large-scale demonstrations that have been taking place against her government.
In consequence, there have been indications of difficulties within her coalition government between herself and her vice-President Michel Temer, the leader of Brazilian Democratic Movement party, who would obviously wish to distance his organization from allegations which stem from the existence of Rousseff’s previous role as Chairperson of Petrobras, and therefore from the Workers Party (PT) administration. And recent corruption charges against the Speaker of the lower House of the Brazilian Congress will perhaps have emboldened him in his current political strategy of distancing from the PT.
The effects of the corruption challenges have been exacerbated by the fact that the economy of the country seems to be moving into substantial difficulty. Brazil, a producer of various commodities, including agricultural products, has become victim to a fall in demand partly based on the post-2008 global economic slowdown, and a decline in commodity exports as a result of the slowdown of the economic boom in China, among other countries.
So recent official indications that the economy has now gone into recession come at a bad time for the President, as they have been automatically accompanied by a rise in unemployment. Her opponents already appear to be calculating that, though recently re-elected, her administration finds itself essentially crippled in terms of its legitimacy to pursue financial policies, including reductions in public expenditure, which can bring economic resources in line with revised economic and financial plans.
An issue for the administration is the extent to which the economic situation, accompanied by President Rousseff’s preoccupation with dealing with the allegations of corruption now being pressed, will allow her to sustain the country’s reputation as a one of the substantial emerging countries or BRICS, and therefore as a leading country in hemispheric and Third World relations.
That status had allowed Brazil to undertake a policy of greater than normal diplomatic autonomy vis-à-vis the United States itself, during President Rousseff’s first term. It permitted the country to join in initiatives like the creation of a BRICS development bank, suggested as an alternative to the World Bank seen as dominated by the United States.
It is left to be seen whether the President can, in the first instance, hold together her majority, since its narrowness in the presidential elections would not appear to have invested her with any greater legitimacy or authority, whether in domestic or international affairs, than she had before. She will continue to be preoccupied by the fact, also, that the current investigations concerning corruption are continuing, and dealing not simply with Petrobras, but other state-run institutions and ministries of the government.
In that sense, her post-election prediction that “close outcomes trigger results more quickly than ample victories”, seems unlikely to become a reality, whether in terms of domestic, hemispheric or Third World relations.
