The government began to end on the night of February 1, 2015. It was when , of , was elected to command the Chamber, defeating the government supporters, and began to impose an agenda of confrontation with the president who had been re-elected a few months ago.
Contrary to voices that preached an agreement in exchange for appeasement in Congress, he launched him to compete with the PMDB member, who was the exponent of what would come to be called the centrão.
There were months of tense relations between the government and Cunha’s group until it culminated in the receipt of the request, in December 2015. Dilma was removed after voting in the vote, on May 12, 2016, exactly a decade ago.
Six years have passed. He was again elected president and one of his main public commitments after the victory was a meeting with (-AL), head of the Chamber and follower of Cunha’s methods, as an aggressive strategy to influence his base, in addition to his ability for regimental maneuvers.
Lula, possibly scalded by the situation experienced by his pupil, did not want to start his third term by picking a fight with the powerful centrão, even though he had called the man from Alagoas “emperor of Japan” in the election campaign, months earlier. The appeasement thesis won, and Lira was re-elected to command the House with the support of the PT.
These circumstances show how much Dilma’s impeachment left deep marks on the political dynamics of subsequent governments and how the shadow of impeachment still influences the political game.
Governments were also walled in by Congress and had to give up power — and the explosion in funds allocated to parliamentary amendments is the most obvious sign of this.
Temer revived after the days of presidential agony following Dilma’s impeachment a year earlier.
Accused by the businessman of buying the silence of Cunha, then imprisoned in Lava Jato, and the target of complaints from the then attorney general, Temer had to face two votes in the Chamber that could cost him his mandate.
The script seemed to be repeated in relation to the PT’s fall: unpopular government, favorable political climate and wear and tear due to accusations of corruption.
The outcome of the “out, Temer” movement was different thanks to the more competent political articulation of the then president, who had been head of the Chamber years before, knew the shortcuts of the Legislature and sought to reward his base.
His tenure in office until the end of his term was guaranteed, but his reform agenda, such as Social Security, fell by the wayside.
With Bolsonaro, the situation was different. His political articulation was non-existent at the beginning of the administration, in which a general with no parliamentary experience —— was recruited from the barracks to be the bridge with . Obviously it didn’t work.
Pressured by the terrible results in managing the pandemic, which included a series of manifestos released by civil society entities, even by businesspeople, Bolsonaro gradually handed over his articulation to the center, thinking about ensuring that the impeachment requests that were accumulating would not come out of the drawer of Arthur Lira, already president of the Chamber.
Just as the precedent of the impeachment of , two decades earlier, was used against Dilma, it is not out of the question that a scenario will return to threaten the next presidents.
The hypothesis is even more credible in a scenario of political complications that seem to have come to stay, such as the deep party fragmentation in the Legislature, the empowered Congress, the persistent low popularity of governments in the face of fierce polarization and an economy that is not moving.
Under Lula 3, the possibility of an impeachment process was never even discussed in the slightest, but the specter of impeachment seems to have set foot in the Três Poderes square, perhaps still as a reflection of the example of ten years ago. There has never been so much talk about the possibility of the removal of ministers from the STF (Supreme Federal Court), a topic that promises to be one of the most debated in this year’s electoral campaign.
