Opposition won't seek Rousseff's impeachment

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SAO PAULO 

Brazil’s biggest opposition party has no interest in impeaching President Dilma Rousseff despite the recent street demonstrations calling for her ouster, former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso said.

Cardoso, 83, remains an influential leader in the centrist Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), said removing Rousseff so soon after she was re-elected would be destructive to Brazil’s 30-year-old democracy, especially since prosecutors have found no evidence she participated in a corruption scheme at state-run oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA.

Nobody should want impeachment, it’s a very complex thing,” said Cardoso, who led Brazil from 1995 to 2002.

He declined to rule out impeachment if new evidence against Rousseff surfaces but said that, for now, those who are calling for it generally “don’t know” the damage it would cause or the necessary preconditions.

“You’d need to have a crime, and a political consensus in Congress as well as in the street. I don’t think that’s the situation here,” he said, adding that most other PSDB leaders think the same way. A poll released on Monday, after Cardoso spoke, showed that 60 per cent of respondents favoured impeaching Rousseff and just 19 per cent approved of her leftist government.

More than 1 million people took to the streets in dozens of cities on March 15 to protest against Rousseff in the biggest demonstrations in Brazil in 30 years. The survey firm MDA showed that 59.7 per cent of respondents favour Rousseff’s impeachment, and 68.9 per cent believe she is responsible for the corruption involving a massive kickback scheme at Petroleo Brasileiro SA.

Cardoso said, however, that Rousseff probably deserves less blame for corruption at Petrobras than her predecessor and Workers’ Party ally Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Lula ran Brazil from 2003 to 2010 - the period when prosecutors say the graft was most intense - and is said to be planning a comeback in 2018, when Rousseff’s term ends.

“If anyone has more political responsibility in this case, it’s him, not her,” Cardoso said, noting that former Petrobras executives accused of orchestrating the graft were political appointees made under Lula.

He said rising popular pressure to punish those involved in the scandal would make it difficult or impossible for Rousseff to strike a political or legal deal to minimise the fallout for the dozens of companies allegedly involved in the graft.

“There’s not going to be a quick solution to this. It’s necessary for justice to prevail. That’s what society is demanding,” he said.

That means the economy probably won’t bottom out until at least late 2015 as companies postpone investments and wait to see if new Finance Minister Joaquim Levy succeeds in pushing austerity measures through Congress, he said.