Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff hunkered down at her residence on Saturday for last-minute negotiations with wavering lawmakers in an effort to secure crucial support the day before an impeachment vote that could lead to her removal from office.
Ms. Rousseff cancelled an appearance at an anti-impeachment rally of union and leftist social activists led by former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, her predecessor and the Workers’ Party leader.
Instead she met with lawmakers behind closed doors in a bid to obtain their vote or abstention on Sunday when the lower house of Congress votes on whether she should be impeached for breaking the country's budget laws.
The talks indicated that Sunday’s ballot may be tighter than expected as Ms. Rousseff seeks to swing the estimated two dozen additional votes she needs to prevent a two-thirds majority in favour of impeachment in the 513-seat lower chamber, which her opponents need to push ahead with this process.
Ms. Rousseff is fighting to survive a political firestorm fuelled by Brazil’s worst recession since the Great Depression and a spiraling corruption scandal centred on state oil company Petrobras that has reached her inner circle. In a video and a newspaper column, Ms. Rousseff strongly denied she had committed an impeachable crime and called the bid to oust her “the biggest legal and political fraud” in Brazil’s history.
“We are facing the threat of a coup d’etat, a coup without guns that uses more destructive methods like fraud and lies to try to destroy a legitimately elected government,” she wrote in the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper’s Saturday edition. — Reuters
