Michel Temer, at 76 Brazil’s oldest president – and one of its most controversial – is the consummate political and business insider. He was first elected as a member of the constituent assembly in 1986 and, according to WikiLeaks, has been providing intelligence on matters Brazilian to the US Embassy since 2006. He rose to leader of the centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (BDMP) and in 2011 became vice-president, under Dilma Rousseff of the leftist Brazilian Workers’ Party. In May 2016, Rousseff was betrayed in a coup supported by her erstwhile allies in the BDMP, with Temer the main political beneficiary.
The ostensible reason for Rousseff’s ouster was for defying a minor provision in the budget laws by using state funds to keep the Bolsa Familia (a vital social grant programme for poor Brazilians) economically viable. This was perceived by some as a grave fraud; by others as an accounting manoeuvre used by many previous administrations. The fiery rhetoric of the coup-makers suggests, however, that their impeachment votes were motivated by that vaunted patriotic triumvirate of the Right – God, Family and Country. Some even harked back to the ‘glory days’ of the 1960s military dictatorship, with one conservative congress member going so far as to dedicate his vote to the person responsible for torturing Rousseff when she was a jailed opponent of the dictatorship, suffering beatings and electric shock.
