Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment: updates on Brazil’s political crisis

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has just been impeached. On Wednesday, the Brazilian Senate voted 61-20 to remove her from office. Vice President Michel Temer will now takeover as president for the forseeable future.

On the surface, the impeachment charges were about allegations that Rousseff cooked the government’s books to hide the scope of Brazil’s deficit problem during her 2014 reelection campaign. But they were really about a bigger slate of problems in Brazil — most importantly, something called the Petrobras scandal.

Late on Wednesday, Brazil’s Senate voted to put President Dilma Rousseff on trial for impeachment. This means she’s out of a job for up to six months: Brazil’s constitution requires the president to step down while on trial for impeachment in the senate.

Vice President Michel Temer will take over — perhaps permanently, as it seems unlikely that Rousseff will be able to come back from the suspension.

To many observers, Brazil appears one swarm of locusts short of a full-fledged biblical plague. Whether it’s the off-again, on-again impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, the country’s worst recession in 80 years (or maybe ever), the spread of the bizarre and frightening Zika virus, or its continued struggle with drug gangs and homicides, Brazil looks anything but ready to host the world at the Summer Olympics this August.

Without a doubt, it has been a terrible 2016 — and a huge letdown after Brazil’s economic boom of the 2000s, which helped it win the Olympics bid in the first place. But the particularly confusing nature of this crisis, paired with the convergence of the world’s media hordes on Rio de Janeiro, has also produced a truly epic amount of misinformation, stereotypes, and wishful thinking.

Here’s the past 24 hours of politics in Brazil:

Again, this all happened within a single day. Can you imagine being Brazilian and having to live with this kind of political inconsistency?

On Wednesday, something surprising and strange happened in Brazil: The president, Dilma Rousseff, appointed former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, her political mentor, to her own Cabinet.

That same day, a Brazilian judge ordered the government to release a wiretap recording of Rousseff — yes, the government is listening in on its own president — speaking to Lula, as he’s commonly known.

For the past two years, Brazil has been rocked by a major corruption scandal involving its state-run oil company, Petrobras. So major, in fact, that it looks like it might go all the way to the top. On Friday morning, Brazilian police raided the home of the country’s previous president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The former president was detained for three hours of questioning, and then released.

Lula, as he’s generally referred to, is a member of the same political party as current President Dilma Rousseff. He’s widely seen as her political mentor. That means any charges that emerge could end up having real consequences for Rousseff and for Brazilian politics more generally.

Brazil is in the middle of a serious political crisis. It’s gotten so bad that 62.8 percent of Brazilians believe President Dilma Rousseff should be impeached. Her government has less than an 8 percent approval rating. Rousseff’s ruling coalition looks increasingly shaky: The head of Brazil’s lower house of Congress, Eduardo Cunha, publicly broke with Rousseff last week and encouraged his party, the largest in Brazil, to leave her coalition. It still seems unlikely that Rousseff will be impeached — but it’s not impossible.

Here’s a brief, simple explanation of what’s going on in Brazil — and of the Petrobras corruption scandal at the center of it all.