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| National Congress of Brazil, in Brasilia, where now former President Dilma Rousseff was impeached in two majority votes. Photograph: National Congress of Brazil from Pixabay (License) (Cropped). |
Dilma Rousseff has lost her battle against impeachment in Brazil, with the Senate confirming the decision of the Chamber of Deputies to expel her from the office of President (Watts & Bowater, 2016). Three-quarters of Senators voted to impeach her on charges of corruption and mismanagement of the budget.
That is unlikely to be the end of the controversy. But for now, it marks the end of a chain of events set against a backdrop of general unrest, with protests against money being spent on huge international events like the World Cup and the Olympics, instead of on practical measures to support the people - like housing and welfare - and an economy deeply affected by the global crisis.
A lot of the present crisis surrounds Brazilian oil. Accusations of bribery surrounding the state oil company Petrobras surrounding the awarding of contracts and its deep connections in Brazilian politics, was uncovered by the corruption investigation known as Operation Car Wash (Watts, 2016).
The result has been a political crisis that has seen Rousseff's predecessor Lula da Silva set to face a corruption trial and the larger part of the political class implicated in the corruption. Rousseff's adversaries have also manoeuvred to have her thrown out of office, though as she is so far avoided direct connection to the scandal, they have pursued her through accusations of fiscal malpractice (Prengaman, 2016).
The impeachment leaves Rousseff's former ally, and now leading figure amongst her opponents, Acting-President Michel Temer in the office of President. While he has the support of the political Right and business that wants austerity measures imposed, he isn't popular - having been booed during the Olympic opening ceremony.
Like Italy's Mani Pulite (Clean Hands) investigation that wiped away the country's established political system and all of its political parties in the early 1990s, Operation Car Wash has thrown open the doors to show how Brazil's system operates behind closed doors - and no one working within that system is likely to come out clean.
That situation is what has toppled Rousseff. The worry is for the political vacuum that might follow the toppling of the rest of the establishment - in Italy it was occupied by the arch-populist Silvio Berlusconi for twenty years.
Yet despite her defeat in what has been denounced as a parliamentary coup, Rousseff insists upon appealing her impeachment by who she describes as usurpers and coup-mongers (Watts & Bowater, 2016). But against a backdrop of massive political-corporate corruption, it is unclear what more can be done at the federal level until it is all swept away.
Clearly, Brazil needs a path out of this dense tangle of overlapping problems. The clear implication is that a new approach is needed.
One option that has been proposed is to embrace the municipal movement, most notably at work in Barcelona, at the local government elections in October and November (Wyllys, 2016). What municipalism offers is a chance to do things a bit differently.
Movements in Brazil are already organising around municipal principles - Muitxos: Cidade que Queremos (Many: the City We Want) in Belo Horizonte, for example (Gutierrez Gonzalez, 2016) - as a way move power away from political-corporate cliques.
With Brazil's federal politics - where pro-market corporate forces face off with populist social democrats over tax and spend projects like social welfare - mired in corruption and accusations, shifting the focus to local government instead could provide a route for citizens to get into politics in a more direct way and perhaps even start to dismantle the corruption from the ground up.
As elsewhere in the world, national politics has been choked by political-corporate cartels, whether de facto or de jure, that restrict political action and assume the driving seat in decision-making.
That path has lead to failures of leadership, where vigilant oversight is lacking - of which, if anything, Rousseff might be legitimately accused, due to being in a senior position during the height of the corruption and yet claiming no knowledge of what was going on.
Devolving power to citizens in their communities and encouraging open city government could help renew the system. And for the municipal movement itself, success in the cities of Brazil would be a major breakthrough.
It is one thing to argue for open source cities, using the twin means of free online resources and open participatory public spaces, that make the municipality a place where people can express their real political power (Gutierrez Gonzalez, 2016{2}).
It is another entirely to see municipal ideas applied to cities on different continents, with different contexts, and see them challenge massive corruption from below by engaging with people in their own communities and returning hope and power to them.
