Even the daughter of the man gearing up to take over Brazil’s top office if President Dilma Rousseff is suspended has come out against the impeachment process, rejecting the potential for her own father to become president Latin America’s largest economy outside elections as bad for democracy.
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Luciana Temer, daughter of Vice President Michel Temer, argued during a constitutional law class that she teaches that impeachment “would not be something positive for the democratic stability of the country,” the Brazilian daily Folha de Sao Paulo reported.
She did not go as far to call the impeachment bid a “coup” like Rousseff and her supporters, citing the fact that it is allowed in the constitution. The government argues that despite being constitutionally allowed, the process lacks the legal basis to justify impeachment given that Rousseff is not accused of any financial impropriety.
Expressing concern for Brazil’s fragile and young democracy, Luciana Temer argued that “24 years is a very short period of sustained democracy to have two impediments,” referring to the 1992 impeachment effort that forced then-President Fernando Affonso Collor de Mello to resign just years after the end of the military dictatorship.
According to a poll this week, six out of 10 Brazilians don’t want to Temer to be president and would prefer to see snap elections this year to choose the country’s leader until 2018 if Rousseff is impeached and not able to carry out her term. Only 8 percent of Brazilians believe Temer can resolve Brazil’s political crisis.
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But despite making proposals for government as if campaigning, Temer rejects the idea of holding early elections in the wake of impeachment, saying such a move would amount to a coup.
Even though Temer’s daughter is against the impeachment process, she agrees with him on the issue of early elections and argues that a snap presidential campaign would amount to a coup.
Recent polls gauging support for potential candidates in the scheduled 2018 election have showed Temer with negligible support of 2 percent, compared to over 20 percent support for Rousseff’s predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Many analysts have argued that the impeachment bid’s justification as a campaign to root out corruption is a pretext to seize power that conservative forces have not been able to win in elections and to shield highly corrupt politicians, including Temer, from facing charges.