Brazilian president fights for political life

RIO DE JANEIRO: President Dilma Rousseff (pix) claims to detect a glimmer at the end of the tunnel in Brazil's political crisis, but what she really may be seeing, analysts say, are the headlights of an oncoming train.
Twin courtroom rulings this week left Rousseff's already shaky presidency tottering and now the former leftist guerrilla's slim hopes for survival depend on a hostile Congress where powerful forces want her impeached.
Less than a year into her second term, Rousseff is floundering with an economy in steep recession, a corruption scandal engulfing much of the elite, and personal popularity ratings of just 10%.
On Wednesday, she put on a brave face to announce that she saw "light at the end of the tunnel."
But that same day the country's accounts court, or TCU, declared her government's budgeting practices illegal – and suddenly she was left fighting for her political life.
According to the court, Rousseff's government broke the law in 2014 by using creative accounting, including taking unauthorised loans from state-owned banks, to cover fiscal holes.
The TCU's unanimous 8-0 ruling painted Rousseff as cavalier with the rules and came despite ferocious government attempts – which failed in the Supreme Court – to have the lead judge removed.
Just one day earlier a different court opened another damaging probe into Rousseff's 2014 election campaign funding, questioning whether among other alleged malpractices she had taken money linked to the Petrobras bribes and embezzlement scandal.
As if that weren't enough for one week, Rousseff was also humiliated in Congress, twice failing to gather enough lawmakers to be able to vote on sustaining her vetoes on important laws – political battles underlining her ebbing control.
"In about 24 hours, President Dilma Rousseff suffered a sequence of defeats in the judiciary and legislature that show, with unheard of eloquence, just how fragile she is," the Folha de Sao Paulo daily said Thursday.

Few friends
The electoral court's probe into Rousseff's campaign funds could in a worst case scenario end in annulment of her 2014 re-election victory. However, that is a distant prospect.
Wednesday's ruling by the accounts court presents a more immediate risk.
Under Brazilian law, the court's opinion now goes to Congress for reviews and a series of votes in committees and then the floor. If the government is defeated at each step, then impeachment proceedings could be launched.
That could take months. However, Brazil's Congress, seething with shifting loyalties, is not friendly territory for Rousseff.
Her biggest danger is the speaker of the lower house, Eduardo Cunha, an ostensible ally until July when he announced he was going into opposition. He has since become the point man for a campaign to impeach Rousseff, a campaign she says amounts to a "coup plot."
A weakness of the pro-impeachment lobby has been that it had little concrete to go on, beyond popular dissatisfaction over Rousseff.
But now with the TCU ruling – the first such condemnation of a government since 1937 – the impeachment push has a burst of political momentum that may embolden Cunha to launch a preemptive attack.
Cunha could possibly jump the gun and put impeachment proceedings in motion in the near future, David Fleischer, a political science professor at University of Brasilia, told AFP.
"He might even act before Congress decides."

Could Rousseff survive?
Fleischer said Rousseff has "destroyed her parliamentary base" and could find her few remaining friends in a weak ruling coalition melting away when it came to impeachment votes.
But Gabriel Petrus, a political analyst at Barral M Jorge consultants, says that "she still has some leverage" because the long, winding procedures would give her multiple opportunities to strike deals.
"In this gloomy situation there is a chance the government may still survive. It may survive because of inertia, because of the political contradictions when you transfer a technical decision (of the TCU) into a political decision," Petrus said.

Leadership vacuum
Another major variable is Cunha himself.
Rousseff's scourge has been implicated in the Petrobras scandal and accused of stashing millions of dollars in Switzerland. He refuses to resign his speaker's post and says he has done nothing wrong.
But given Cunha's problems, he may be ready to cut compromises with Rousseff and "negotiate his future," Petrus said.
The real question, analysts say, is how Rousseff, regularly accused of lacking leadership qualities and often seemingly uninterested in day-to-day politics, will react.
Will she come out swinging – or give up?
"Some people think she might simply resign, but she is a very firm woman, very resolute and thinks she does everything right, so stepping down is not in her modus operandi," Fleischer said.
With an economy badly in need of reform and the Petrobras scandal exposing a culture of high-level theft, the political games add to Brazil's sense of dangerous drift.
"It's a black hole," Petrus said.
"It's really sad we're suffering this, that we have no alternatives." – AFP