It could be a short honeymoon for Brazil’s interim president Michel Temer, who replaces a deeply unpopular leader but inherits many of the same problems.
Brazilians are hoping their country can finally move on from a months-long battle over suspended president Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, which distracted their political leaders from a laundry list of woes, including the worst recession in decades.
But although Temer has the backing of the business world, political analysts say he will likely hit many of the same stumbling blocks as did Rousseff, who was suspended by the Senate yesterday for up to 180 days pending an impeachment trial on charges of hiding budget shortfalls.
Temer, who has spent his career in the wings of power but never at centre stage, will also face some new challenges all his own.
A 75-year-old veteran of the centre-right, Temer is just about as unpopular as Rousseff, the leftist leader he served as vice president in an awkward, ultimately aborted alliance.
While Rousseff’s approval rating has tumbled below 10%, Temer would receive just 1-2% of the vote in presidential elections, according to a recent poll.
He has a reputation in Brasilia as a deft backdoor negotiator, but is short on charisma and was all-but unknown to many voters until recently.
Condemned by Rousseff as the “coup-monger in chief,” he could struggle to heal the wounds of the impeachment battle and restore faith in a political system many Brazilians see as hopelessly corrupt.
“He will inherit a good part of Brazilians’ dissatisfaction with the kind of traditional politics he represents,” said Thiago Bottino, an analyst at the Getulio Vargas Foundation. “It’s not going to be easy for him to present himself as a new man with no relation to the felled leadership.”
Lincoln Secco, a historian at the University of Sao Paulo, said Temer would also face another problem: Rousseff.
“For five to six months, we’ll have the president (Rousseff), but she won’t exercise that function. Temer will have the president’s shadow hanging over him, pressuring his government to achieve fast results,” he said.
The Temer administration’s greatest hope is to revive the tanking economy, Latin America’s largest.
The business world has been rubbing its hands at the prospect of a more market-friendly government after years of left-leaning policy and ballooning deficits.
Brazil is in the middle of its second year of recession and is not forecast to return to growth until 2018.
To turn things around, Temer has proposed a “bridge to the future” that includes spending cuts and free-market reforms.
But getting such changes through the fragmented political system will be tough. And the pain may get worse before it gets better.
A giant country of huge inequalities, Brazil has had a transformative 13 years under Rousseff and her predecessor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, whose social programmes helped lift tens of millions of people from poverty.
Temer’s party, the PMDB, has been broadsided by the corruption investigation upending Brazilian politics, which uncovered a multibillion-dollar bribery and kickbacks scheme centred on state oil company Petrobras.
The explosive investigation, dubbed Operation Car Wash (“Lava Jato”), was the main rallying cry for the movement to oust Rousseff - although she has not been implicated herself.