With Rousseff ousted, vice president assembles right-wing government in Brazil

With Rousseff ousted, vice president assembles right-wing government in Brazil

By Bill Van Auken
13 May 2016

Michel Temer, the vice president and former political ally of ousted Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores—PT) President Dilma Rousseff, formally took control of Planalto, the presidential offices in Brasilia, Thursday, declaring that his would be a government of “national salvation,” and assembling a cabinet of right-wing politicians and capitalist economists from the banking and financial sector.

With the Brazilian Senate having voted that morning after an all-night session to initiate impeachment proceedings against Rousseff, she was suspended from office for the length of a trial that will likely run into September or October. While only a simple majority vote was required to begin this process, the lopsided result was 55 to 22, more than the two-thirds majority that is ultimately required to permanently remove the PT president from office.

Given that the basis of the impeachment charges—Rousseff’s alleged manipulation of budgetary accounts to cover for temporary shortfalls—was clearly contrived as a pretext, a final conviction appears inevitable.

Brazil is the largest country in Latin America and the seventh largest economy in the world. Rousseff received 54 million votes in 2014 when she was reelected to a second term as president. This election has now been overturned through an anti-democratic political conspiracy at the highest level of the Brazilian ruling elite.

In his first speech to the nation, Temer, surrounded by a coterie of smirking politicians from nearly every party outside of the PT, stressed that his government would work to “improve the environment for investment by the private sector” and carry out “fundamental reforms” designed to shift the burden of the country’s profound economic crisis even more directly onto the backs of the masses of Brazilian workers.

More:
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/05/13/braz-m13.html