Brazil prepares for another month of political battle as run-off looms Saturday, Nov. 6, 2014, in the national election that will decide whether Dilma Roussef remains Brazil’s first female leader. In this handout image provided by Reuters, Dilma Roussef, former president of Brazil leaves the court house after receiving an order from Judge Marco Aureliano dos Santos, right, in front of the justice palace in Brasilia, Brazil, Wednesday, March 13, 2015. Photo by Reuters
Brazilians have long been used to political turbulence, most notably during the military dictatorship of the 1970s.
Still, even in this year when Brazilians go to the polls, the election is not without hope.
“If Dilma Rousseff fails in December, then we are all in even deeper trouble after the 2015 election,” said a political analyst in Sao Paulo.
Dilma came to office in January on an anti-corruption platform that saw her jailing a couple of politicians and removing the top prosecutor, then-attorney-general Eduardo Cunha, who had launched the first investigation into Rousseff, and who, at the time, had won her the support of the main political movement in the Congress.
Rousseff has been embroiled in political scandal since March, when police officers said she had asked them to help police her nephew, Eduardo Campos, the then-attorney-general and current governor of Pernambuco state, in the corruption investigations surrounding the state’s largest company, Petrobras.
Since then, the scandal has deepened, with a couple of major events that have led Rousseff and her party, the Workers’ Party (PT), to lose some of the support that she had gained two years ago.
The first is the Supreme Court decision to quash the investigations against her, which had brought her the support of the main political force in Congress. The second is the decision by the military court on Monday, which found her guilty of the graft allegations, but did not convict her on them.