Brazilian Left pushing hard for referendum to stop rightward slide
Brazilian Left pushing hard for referendum to stop rightward slide
by: Emile Schepers
June 20 2016
The left in Brazil, including the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB), is pushing hard for a referendum as a tactic to block right-wing, anti-worker policies being imposed by the government of interim President Michel Temer of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB). The referendum would, if approved, authorize new elections for October of this year, instead of in 2018 as scheduled. But holding the referendum depends on first defeating the efforts of the right to remove President Dilma Rousseff from office.
Temer, the former vice president of Brazil, took power on May 12 when the Brazilian Senate voted to suspend the twice-elected president, Dilma Rousseff of the Workers' Party (PT), while she faces an impeachment trial. If Rousseff is convicted by a two-thirds vote of the 81 member Senate for the dubious "crime" of having fudged some accounting measures in 2014 and 2015 in order to cover a budget deficit, Temer will take over as official president until the 2018 national elections. If Rousseff is acquitted by the Senate, or if no decision is achieved within 180 days of the Senate taking up the impeachment charges, she will take power once again. Term limit laws prevent Rousseff from running again in 2018.
But Temer is in worse shape: He can't run for president either because of credible accusations of corruption in the huge Lava Jato (operation Jet Car Wash) scandal, which grow and grow. The latest news on Temer is that a businessman who has been seeking a plea bargain in his own corruption prosecution has accused Temer of arranging an illegal campaign contribution for one of his party's candidates for election from a company doing business with the national oil company, PETROBRAS. The former president of the Chamber of Deputies, Eduardo Cunha of the PMDB, and the moving spirit of the effort to impeach President Rousseff, faces his own multi-dimensional corruption probes and probable prosecution. On Tuesday, June 14, the Ethics Committee of the Chamber of Deputies voted 11 to 9 to suspend Cunha from his chairmanship and ban him from electoral activity for eight years for lying about his secret offshore bank accounts. This vote must now be confirmed by the full Chamber. Cunha has reportedly told interim president Temer that if he eventually "goes down" he will take up to 150 federal legislators with him, including top allies of Temer.
Should Temer, as many have demanded, also be impeached and removed from office, Cunha would have been the person to take over the presidency while the trial of Rousseff continued. This now seems impossible. The next in line to take over the presidency would be the President of the Senate, Renan Calheiros, also from the PMDB, but he is also now implicated in the corruption scandals, having been caught on tape maneuvering to blunt the Lava Jato investigations. So he might also be removed from the line of succession to the presidency. To balance things out a bit, Aécio Neves, from the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB, a right-wing party despite its name), who narrowly lost the presidential vote to Dilma Rousseff in the 2014 elections, is now also implicated in Lava Jato.
More:
http://peoplesworld.org/brazilian-left-pushing-hard-for-referendum-to-stop-rightward-slide/
