Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff at a a press conference where she spoke about her impeachment process, at Planalto Presidential Palace, in Brasilia, April 18, 2016.Eraldo Peres/The Associated Press
While members of Brazil's lower house of Congress lined up Sunday night to vote, one by one, on whether to impeach President Dilma Rousseff, many of those in favour posed for pictures on the floor of the house wrapped in the national flag. They brought their spouses – often women in Louboutin stilettos carrying Chanel and Birkin handbags – to pose against the backdrop of the vote. And they shouted and cheered and shot off confetti bombs, like a high school football game.
Outside, the tens of thousands of protesters who came to support the impeachment chanted, "Fora PT!" about the President's Workers' Party, or PT in Portuguese. It means "get out," and it also means gone.
After 13 years of Workers' Party rule in Brasilia, a period when a steelworker with a grade-school education was president, a black domestic worker was elected to Congress and a rubber tapper from the Amazon became a senator – there is now a palpable shifting of power here.
On Monday, the PT called its members to a long strategy session from which they emerged in late afternoon with set faces. Meanwhile, members of the evangelical Christian and rural landowner caucuses, who are close to Eduardo Cunha, the lower-house speaker who steered the impeachment drive, strode through the halls of Congress on Monday with clusters of reporters scurrying in their wake.
"There is a very reactionary conservative force in politics here – it's always been there, but in the last 13 years it was quelled," said Chico Alencar, who represents a left-wing party. He is a critic of the President but voted against her impeachment. "Now, it's back out of the closet."
Mr. Cunha represents the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), the largest party in Brazil that, until three weeks ago, was a part of Ms. Rousseff's coalition. On Sunday night, he sat on the dais impassive, calling the roll of the vote, while the increasingly jubilant pro-impeachment side racked up its tally. Should the Senate agree to open an impeachment trial of Ms. Rousseff, which it is expected to do in the next few weeks, she will be forced to step aside for 180 days – and her Vice-President, Michel Temer, a senior PMDB figure, becomes interim president.
Rogerio Rosso, who chaired the impeachment commission that assessed charges of fiscal mismanagement against Ms. Rousseff, said the celebration in the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, was "a reflection of the mood of all Brazil" and had nothing to do with a new configuration of power.
"Yesterday, in the streets and in the house, it was like a World Cup win," he said. "Look, with 10 million unemployed and productivity nose-diving, with Brazil utterly without credibility in the eyes of the international markets, people wanted a change, they wanted hope. That's what they're celebrating, not a change of power."
He was at pains to note that the house was voting to send the charges to the Senate, but that the house does not impeach her. "We just sent them the question."
When Workers' Party founder Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was elected, he implemented a swath of pro-poor policies that, combined with a surging economy that rode the commodity boom, helped to move some 35 million people out of poverty and into a new lower-middle class. The Bolsa Familia, or family grant, made a monthly cash transfer to low-income families who got their kids vaccinated and kept them in school. The government put affirmative-action policies in place at the free, high-quality public universities that were once a bastion of the wealthy, white elite. Minimum wage increased by 72 per cent in real terms from 2002 to 2013. The new consumers, for whom the PT designed a host of cheap-credit programs, formed a powerful voting bloc and returned the party to office three times.
But Mr. da Silva cultivated an amicable relationship with the country's industrialists, sending them a letter before the election that said, as Mr. Alencar characterized it, "Calma, I will respect all your contracts." And they, in turn, "saw Lula as a wonderful surprise."
Mr. da Silva chose Ms. Rousseff as his successor and she won her first term by a landslide. But the economy was already in trouble in 2014, when she stood for re-election, and she won by just 3 per cent. She responded to the sharp economic downturn with a series of failed policies that only exacerbated the crisis. At the same time, she allowed a sweeping investigation into corruption to advance (against her own party, but also all the others). And she refused to cultivate Congress or engage in the deal making at which Mr. da Silva excelled.
"People celebrated impeachment here last night because everyone was mistreated by her – she didn't take us seriously," said Lucio Vieira Lima, a PMDB member for Bahia, who voted for her removal although he was part of Ms. Rousseff's coalition until three weeks ago.
With the downturn, the traditional moneyed interests decided they did not like Ms. Rousseff or her party after all, Mr. Alencar said. The federations of industry took out pages of newspaper ads demanding impeachment; the national agricultural lobby bused in thousands of protesters to Brasilia. The newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo reported the day of the vote that a handful of members of Congress changed their vote to pro-impeachment after major corporate donors called them up to insist. Eliseu Padilha, a former minister and ally of Mr. Temer, told reporters the pro-impeachment side could send private jets to pick up Congress members to ensure they could vote.
"They didn't want a government that divided its resources with the poorest – they want a government that concentrates wealth," said Maria do Rosario, a prominent Workers' Party Congress member from the far south. "There's an economic crisis in this country and they don't want to share. It was easy to be generous when the economy was growing and global conditions were favourable."
Ms. do Rosario argues that there is a parallel between the impeachment of Ms. Rousseff and other key moments in Brazil, including the 1964 military coup and the unrest of 1954, after the government raised minimum wage 100 per cent.
"Power in Brazil is always very conservative and elite, and at various events in the history of Brazil, we had a rupturing of institutions and the rules of democracy so that the economic elite could maintain its power," she said. "This is another of those."
Mr. Vieira Lima counters that it is purely frustration with the incompetence and mismanagement that drove the impeachment vote.
Outside the house on Sunday night, many pro-impeachment demonstrators wore T-shirts and carried signs that read "Give me back my Brazil." And some sported stickers with a striking emblem. It showed a hand-print with a red line drawn through it – the hand was Mr. da Silva's distinctive four-fingered print, with one digit missing from an accident he suffered as a young man on the factory floor. And through it, it said, "Enough!"