Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff will fight for her political life in Congress, the courts and streets this week, but her path to survival is getting ever narrower, analysts say.
Rousseff faces impeachment proceedings over alleged fiscal mismanagement, while the Supreme Court is considering possible campaign funding irregularities that could end up annulling her 2014 re-election.
Those threats had appeared to be receding in the last few weeks. Even Rousseff’s dismal popularity ratings were creeping up.
But on Friday, what analyst Gabriel Petrus called “an atomic bomb” was thrown at her leftist Workers’ Party with the brief detention of Rousseff’s mentor and charismatic predecessor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Lula, as he is universally known, is accused of taking bribes from companies involved in the gargantuan embezzlement and kickbacks scheme at state oil company Petrobras. And the extraordinary scene of a powerful ex-president being taken away by police, backed up by officers in camouflage with rifles, brought all the simmering tensions to a boil.
Now, after the relative lull, both the opposition and pro-Rousseff camps are promising to take to the streets, while opposition parties in Congress are licking their lips over a revitalised impeachment push.
Petrus, at the Brasilia-based consultancy Barral M Jorge Associates, said both Lula and Rousseff have their backs up against the wall - and if necessary will go down swinging.
“The Workers’ Party will play a winner-take-all strategy - everything or nothing,” Petrus said. “I think both sides are preparing for that battle.”
The Workers’ Party will try to show its muscle with a series of demonstrations announced in big cities, starting tomorrow and building up to a major showing on February 18th.
But analysts believe the turnout will be dwarfed by opposition rallies across the country this Sunday - and that huge crowds could push hesitant congressional deputies over the edge in backing the push to impeach Rousseff.
David Fleischer, a political science professor at the University of Brasilia, said that prosecutors are “closing the circle” around Lula, who denies having taken corrupt money and denounced the police operation against him on Friday as “a show.”
“He’s going to be in jail in a few weeks probably,” Fleischer predicted.
But as the reaction to Friday’s drama showed, Workers’ Party loyalists increasingly see the legal assaults on Lula and Rousseff as an attack on the very essence of the country’s leftist movement. And that’s getting them fired up.
“If Lula is arrested, for example, it could get quite nasty,” Fleischer said.
The president of Latin America’s biggest country is an ex-member of a leftist guerrilla group who endured torture under the 1964-85 dictatorship. Even those survival skills may be insufficient now.
Analysts say Rousseff’s fate may be decided not in the streets or even in the Supreme Court, but in prosecutorial and police offices where former friends and allies ensnared in the Petrobras scandal are negotiating plea bargains.
Unconfirmed reports that Workers’ Party senator Delcidio do Amaral is preparing to testify that Rousseff obstructed the Petrobras investigation have already caused a huge stir and could give powerful ammunition to the impeachment camp.
Other major figures arrested on charges of participating in the vast corruption scheme include construction tycoon Marcelo Odebrecht and political campaign guru Joao Santana.
“There’s going to be a lot more plea bargaining, new information coming out,” Fleischer said, “and Congress will restart the impeachment process, probably next week.”