A 75-year-old lawyer and politician of Lebanese descent, Michel Temer, became president of Brazil; both the oldest man and first of non-European ancestry to take office.

Replacing Dilma Rousseff (commonly known as ‘Dilma’) the country’s first female president, it was Dilma and her centre-left Worker’s Party (PT) that had actually been elected as President by the people of Brazil at the last elections in 2014 with a 51% share of the popular vote. Temer’s influential Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) governed in coalition with the PT. He and Dilma were never close “I spent four years being absolutely ostracized” he would later say. “We were not friends because she did not consider herself my friend” ¹. Compared by rivals to a butler in a horror movie because of his formal bearing, cryptic demeanour and oft-memed resemblance to Bela Lugosi, Temer always seemed to be discretely hovering around the centre of power but never in the spotlight until his moment suddenly came to play the role of king instead of kingmaker.

Beyond its beaches, football, bossa nova and the beautifully transposed curved lines of Oscar Neimeyer, Brazil remains something of an enigma to outsiders. The world’s fifth largest country with a population of over 200 million people. It is also the tenth largest national economy, boosted in recent years by soybean and grain exports as well as newly discovered offshore gas reserves. With its lack of decent infrastructure and high rate of abject poverty (25% of Brazilians live in favela slums) the country has yet to live up to its true potential. The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig described Brazil as the ‘Land of the Future’ ² after fleeing the Nazis in 1940 and becoming completely immersed in its physical beauty. It remains so.

The remarkable period between 1995 and 2010 was perhaps the nearest Brazil ever came to overturning decades of perennial disappointment. During those 15 years, the centre-right Social Democratic Party (PSDB) ably led by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso followed by the centre-left PT led by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (known as ‘Lula’) guided Brazil through an extraordinary period of growth. Riding a wave of high commodity prices, capita income increased by 40% while income inequality fell by 10%.

Lula’s story is truly inspirational. Born in the drought-ridden backlands of Pernambuco in the country’s poverty-stricken north-east, his family were among millions to migrate to the pivotal south-east in 1952. As a 7-year-old he would travel for a fortnight in the back of a flatbed truck to reach Santos, the port city of Sao Paulo. Leaving school early to sell oranges and peanuts, Lula didn’t learn to read until he was 10. ‘Squat and bearded, with the barrel torso of a manual labourer who ate rice and beans’ ³. He would later emerge as the chain-smoking leader of the metalworkers trade union famously heading up the first strikes against the country’s military dictatorship in the 1970s. Later unsuccessfully running for president in 1989, 1994, and 1998 he finally won in 2002 – the first time in the nation’s history that a candidate from the centre-left had ever done so. Lula would successfully combine growth with income re-distribution including a big rise in the minimum wage and ambitious social programmes. None epitomise his administration as much as the Family Allowance (Bolsa Familia or PBF). This gave regular cash payments to help low-income families in return for vaccinating their children and sending them to school. Costing just 0.5% of GDP, it would represent superb value for money with malnutrition falling by half during Lula’s presidency. Even allowing for the Mensalao scandal of 2005 in which the ruling PT was found to have bribed a number of parliamentary deputies each month to vote for legislation using funds it funnelled via state-owned companies (see previous chapter), Lula’s two-term administration ending in 2010 was extremely popular amassing an 80% national approval rating.

He would be succeeded in 2011 by Dilma, his chief of staff. A former socialist who joined left-wing Marxist urban guerrilla groups at the age of just 19. As a middle-class youth she had been arrested in Sao Paulo in 1970 and tortured for 22 days by agents of OBAN (Brazil’s Cold War era secret police). In prison basements she was beaten, administered with electric shocks and made to hang from a horizontal pole by the back of her knees – a device known as the parrot’s perch – before being jailed for 2 years.

Unfortunately, Dilma did not handle the challenge of sustaining growth whilst restraining inflation very well. Her government zig-zagged from one policy to another, generating uncertainty. The economy juddered to a halt before stagnating. With Lula’s help, Dilma maintained the PT’s tenuous hold on power by forming the broadest, most heterogenous coalition assembled by any president ranging from communist to right wing populist parties. In doing so, the PMDB (a voice of Brazil’s corporate state) crept into the heart of government with Michel Temer, one of its most senior leaders, becoming vice president in 2011. By mid-2013 things started to go badly wrong. A series of protests rocked the country. These were a Brazilian cry of frustration against a corrupt, unrepresentative and self-serving political class as well as the poor quality of public services – so unlike the ‘FIFA standard’ football stadiums being lavishly built across the country to host the 2014 World Cup.

Then began the 2014 Carwash Investigation (Lava Jato). An enquiry into money laundering above a carwash in the capital Brasilia. This uncovered widespread and systematic corruption involving kickbacks for government contracts, illegal campaign financing and bribes to executives of state-owned firms and elected politicians. The Brazilian nationalised oil company Petrobras in particular had been bled for many years both by parties in power and opposition. Lava Jato was handled by Sergio Moro, a young and ambitious judge from Curitiba known for his creativity and media courtship. He made aggressive use of new provisions in a recently approved anti-corruption law (which followed Mensalao) including plea-bargaining and preventative detention. Prior Federal investigations of this sort were effectively archived whilst historically the poor had had their rights systemically violated. Suddenly Brazilians were being treated to the spectacle of seeing top company managers and later over fifty politicians being seized by police from their plush homes, arrested, investigated and often jailed. Carwash was very popular in Brazil ⁴.

There is little question that the PT would have stopped Carwash if it could, as the investigation began to ensnare some its top members. To her credit, Dilma resisted pressure from Lula and others to replace her justice minister, Jose Eduardo Cardozo, who did not interfere with the investigation. By the time Cardozo was eventually replaced with Eugenio Aragao (more widely regarded as being anti-Carwash) she had become too weak politically to work out any deals that could have saved her. Although Dilma narrowly won re-election in 2014 by promising to avoid further austerity (only to then slash spending on the education budget and remove price caps on gas and electricity whilst simultaneously offering tax breaks and cheap loans to the wealthy to curry favour with her coalition partners) the severe recession of 2015 reversed the positive inroads made in preceding years with the national economy shrinking by 7%. In the political chaos that followed, the PMDB saw an opportunity to seize power. In a series of carefully plotted moves Temer publicly positioned himself as a rival president that would stand for stability. He complained that Dilma had excluded him from government decisions and treated him like a “decorative” vice president ⁵ (cue further memes depicting Temer beautifying Christmas). He would further accuse Dilma of having no confidence in him or his party.

Eduardo Cunha, the President of the Chamber of Deputies (an Evangelical Christian also of the PMDB, now in jail for corruption) then accepted a petition for Dilma’s impeachment on the grounds that she had used money borrowed from state banks to cover budget deficits and pay for social programs. This was a technical charge. A pretext. Similar budgetary sleights of hand had been used by other elected officials in the past and it was questionable whether or not her actions were truly an impeachable offense. Certainly, no allegations of personal corruption against Dilma were ever made. In reality the push for impeachment was largely fuelled by other lawmakers’ desires to deflect attention from more serious investigations into the PMDB leadership in the wake of Carwash. The political equivalent of blaming the high school nerd for getting the prom queen pregnant. Indeed, Dilma described her impeachment as nothing more than a coup by a right-wing opposition that had otherwise failed to legitimately defeat the PT in four consecutive general elections over a period of 13 years.

By March 2016 the PT’s alliance with the PMDB collapsed. Dilma’s administration floundered with an approval rating of just 10%. The following month an audiotape of Temer practicing his presidential acceptance speech was leaked just hours before a special lower house committee was scheduled to vote whether to back the request to impeach the president, generating complaints and accusations of treachery. Temer alleged it was sent ‘by mistake’ ⁶ to a group of his party’s representatives in Congress.

In the early hours of 12 May 2016, the Federal Senate voted to accept Dilma’s impeachment. Some congressman used the event to grandstand for the cameras; dedicating their votes on behalf of their family, God, relatives, spouses, in honour of a federal highway, even bizarrely for “peace in Jerusalem” ⁷. Per the Brazilian constitution, Dilma’s powers were suspended and Temer became acting president while the Senate decided whether to convict her and remove her from office.

This left Temer in charge of Latin America’s biggest country at a time that it was grappling with its worst economic crisis in decades, a Zika epidemic, seething political discord and responsibility for hosting the 2016 Summer Olympics – all at the same time. On his first day as acting president, Temer appointed a new cabinet. For the first time since the 1970s, there were no women (Dilma had earlier suggested that sexism in the male-dominated Congress had played a key part in the impeachment process). There were also no ministers of colour even though more than 50% of Brazilians are of African origin – the legacy of a 300-year-old slave owning society, the largest in the world only abolished in 1888. Furthermore, seven of Temer’s new ministers were being investigated for allegedly taking bribes from Petrobras or its partners. Temer himself was implicated, allegedly receiving $1.5 million from a construction company which he claimed was a legal campaign donation. A sign of things to come, on 2 June 2016 he was formally convicted of violating election laws and as punishment banned from running for any further political office for eight years by a regional election court in Sao Paulo.

As acting president, it was Temer who opened the Olympic games held in Rio de Janeiro on 5 August 2016. He was advised by the Rio Olympic Committee as part of “Operation Stifle Boos” ⁸ to keep his speech as short as he could, possibly only 10 seconds, to thwart anticipated efforts by angry Brazilians to shout him down. A few weeks later on 31 August 2016, the Senate voted 61-20 to remove Dilma from office, meaning Temer would formally succeed her and serve out the remainder of her second term as president marking an ignominious end to 13 years of centre-left rule. Dilma would describe the entire impeachment process as worse than the state sanctioned torture she endured as a young woman. She insisted on her innocence, warning that Brazil’s economic elite would now roll back the social programs that had lifted millions out of poverty over the last decade. Six miserable years later, that certainly seemed to be the country’s present direction of travel until Lula’s re-election and return to power in 2022.