Suspended Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff (C) addresses supporters after the Brazilian Senate voted to impeach her for breaking budget laws, at Planalto Palace in Brasilia, Brazil, May 12, 2016. REUTERS/Paulo WhitakerPAULO WHITAKER/Reuters
Brazil's change in government is fully under way. Dilma Rousseff bade an impassioned farewell to supporters as she left the presidential palace in Brasilia Thursday. And Michel Temer was sworn in as acting president and unveiled his cabinet.
After a marathon 20-hour session that ended after dawn, senators voted 55 to 22 to open a trial of Ms. Rousseff for violating federal budgetary laws, forcing her to step aside for 180 days. She vowed to fight on, but the wide margin of the vote suggests she will not succeed in stopping the impeachment.
In her last moments in office, Ms. Rousseff continued to insist she was the victim of a coup and called on her supporters to resist. "They have taken by force what they could not conquer at the ballot box," she said of the opposition.
Poised except for a brief moment when her voice wavered, she said she was proud to have been Brazil's first female president. She made references to her brutal treatment as a prisoner of the military dictatorship when she was a guerrilla and to her later fight with cancer.
"I have suffered the invisible pain of torture, the emotional pain of illness, and now I suffer once more the equally unspeakable pain of injustice," she said.
"What hurts the most in this moment is the injustice. It's the realization that I'm the victim of a judicial and political farce. But I do not falter. I look back and I see everything we have done. I look onwards and I see everything we need to do … I look at myself and see the face of someone who, even though marked by time, still has the strength to fight for their beliefs and rights."
Leaving the palace, she was embraced by her political mentor, former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. She led her ministers and key advisers down the iconic ramp in front of the presidential palace and plunged into a crowd of about 2,500 supporters, many clad in the red of her Workers' Party.
Mr. Temer, meanwhile, was signing the paperwork to take over.
The BM&F Bovespa, the Sao Paulo stock market, was up 1.3 per cent at midday. Mr. Temer takes office with high expectations from the business community, which campaigned vigorously for the impeachment. But Brazil is facing a grim macroeconomic picture: Inflation and unemployment are both above 10 per cent, while GDP contracted by 3.8 per cent last year and may shrink further this year.
In his first move, Mr. Temer cut the number of cabinet posts from 31 to 21, a step that won't save a lot of money, since ministries will be amalgamated, but is intended as a sign of his commitment to shrinking government.
The most notable fact about his new cabinet may be that it contains only men – it is the first since 1979 to have not a single female minister. (They are also all white, in a country that is more than 53 per cent black or of mixed race.) Mr. Temer awarded the Health Ministry – with the largest budget of the ministries – to Ricardo Barros of the Progressive Party. Opponents were quick to point out that the party has the largest number of politicians under investigation in the giant Lava Jato corruption scandal.
There are renewed concerns about the future of that investigation after Mr. Temer gave the Justice Ministry to Alexandre de Moraes, who acted as lawyer to Eduardo Cunha, the former speaker of the lower house of Congress. On May 5, Mr. Cunha was deposed from the office by the Supreme Court on the grounds that he tried to obstruct an investigation into charges he accepted millions of dollars in bribes and hid them in a Swiss bank account that he then, under oath, denied having. The Justice Minister is responsible for the federal police, which is conducting the Lava Jato investigation.
The Justice portfolio will now also include responsibility for human rights issues. Amnesty International pointed out that while he was security chief for the state of Sao Paulo, Mr. Moraes oversaw one of the most violent police forces in the world, killing two people a day in the first two months of this year.
Blairo Maggi, a soy baron, takes over the Agriculture Ministry, a portfolio where a critical driver of the Brazilian economy is often pitted against conservation pressure, especially in the critical Amazonian area. In recent weeks, Mr. Maggi has been advancing a constitutional amendment that would sharply curtail environmental protections.
The one appointment that appeared popular in almost all quarters was that of Henrique Meirelles as Finance Minister, who served as governor of the Central Bank from 2003-11, when Brazil's economy soared.
Mr. Meirelles made an unsuccessful attempt to be chosen as Ms. Rousseff's running mate in 2010 and is believed to still harbour ambitions for the presidency.
So does another key figure in the Temer government, Jose Serra, who is now Foreign Minister and lost the presidency to Ms. Rousseff in 2010.
Mr. Temer has said he will not run in 2018 – and indeed can't: The man who takes over as President of Brazil today was last week found guilty of violating electoral finance rules in his last campaign and barred from running for office for eight years.