I N T E R N AT I O N A LTHURSDAY, MARCH 31, 2016

BRASILIA: Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was leftscrambling for votes to save her presidency in a loom-ing impeachment showdown after her main coalitionpartner walked out of the government Tuesday. ThePMDB, the country’s largest party, voted to immediatelyend its alliance with Rousseff’s leftist Workers’ Party, orPT, and go into opposition. “From today, at this historicmeeting of the PMDB, the PMDB withdraws from thegovernment of President Rousseff,” said SenatorRomero Juca, the party vice president. The meeting,broadcast live on national television, was the culmina-tion of a long divorce with Rousseff, leaving Brazil’s firstfemale president grasping at straws as she tries to stayin power. The vote and announcement took no morethan three minutes and was accompanied by singing ofthe national anthem and shouts of “PT out!”The splitplunges Rousseff’s government into fresh crisis modeand, more seriously, greatly reduces her chances ofmustering the one third of votes in the lower house ofCongress that she needs to defeat a first impeachmentvote, expected in April. “If you look at the numbers,that’s basically it,” said Everaldo Moraes, a political sci-ence professor at Brasilia National University. Rousseffcancelled a trip to Washington for a nuclear safety sum-mit on Thursday and Friday, the state news agency said.A government spokesman said that in “the currentpolitical context,” it was not advisable.

Last nail in coffin?If the lower house votes in favor, an impeachment

trial would start in the Senate, where a two-thirds votewould force Rousseff from office. PMDB head MichelTemer-who remains vice president under Rousseffdespite the break-up would take over as interim presi-dent. Eliseu Padilha, a high-ranking PMDB memberwho served as minister of civil aviation in Rousseff’sgovernment, predicted that Rousseff had only weeksleft. “In less than three months we’ll have a new gov-ernment-in two months,” he told AFP. Senator AecioNeves, who heads the PSDB opposition party and whonarrowly lost to Rousseff when she won re-election in2014, said: “The exit of the PMDB is the last nail in thecoffin.” The PMDB has 69 of the 513 lower house seatsand 60 of these deputies will vote for impeachment,Padilha said. Analysts say that the PMDB’s exit couldalso encourage minor coalition partners to quit.Lawmakers from the center-right Progressive Party,which has 49 deputies, and the center-left SocialDemocratic Party, which has 32, said their partieswould meet this week on a possible split.

However, Workers’ Party loyalists are negotiatingintensely with individual deputies, trying to persuadethem to vote against the grain. “We can’t give an exactevaluation, but they are exaggerating the support forimpeachment among PMDB deputies,” said AlfonsoFlorence, from the Workers’ Party, who represents thegovernment in the lower house. Echoing Rousseff,Florence said the opposition was effectively mounting“a coup.” The impeachment case alleges that Rousseffillegally borrowed money to boost public spendingand mask the severity of the recession from voters dur-ing her re-election. The Brazilian bar association filed anew impeachment petition Monday, seeking toexpand the accusations to include allegations of

involvement by Rousseff in the multibillion-dollar cor-ruption scandal centered on state oil companyPetrobras.

Lula controversyAlthough still vice president, Temer, 75, increasingly

resembles a politician preparing for power. . The growinginstability has spilled onto the streets with millions ofBrazilians marching against Rousseff and smaller, but still

vigorous, rallies held in her defense. Another round ofpro-Rousseff protests was planned for this Thursday.Rousseff has called on her mentor, former president LuizInacio Lula da Silva, to become chief of staff so that hecould stiffen resolve in the ranks and put his negotiatingskills to use. But the move prompted a swift backlashfrom opponents who see the appointment as a bid togive Lula ministerial immunity and protect him from cor-ruption allegations related to the Petrobras probe. —AFP

Brazil coalition collapsesRousseff left clinging to power

BRASILIA: Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff (right) and World Trade Organization(WTO) Director-General Roberto Azevedo meet at Planalto Palace in Brasilia. —AFP

SAO PAULO: When Brazil Vice President Michel Temercomplained to embattled President Dilma Rousseff thathe didn’t like being a “decorative” figure, he was beingserious. Now he could be about to take her job. Temerand Rousseff always made an awkward couple. As headof the PMDB centrist party, Temer represented thebiggest force in leftist Rousseff’s shaky coalition.

For years, the PMDB has played that kingmakerrole and it worked. But on Tuesday, the party voted toquit the government and go into opposition, sup-porting an ever stronger push to impeach Rousseff.And if she is removed from office, the outwardly dourTemer becomes interim president. The 75-year-oldlawyer has a low profile for someone in such a lynch-pin position at the top of Latin America’s biggestcountry and economy. If anything, the constitutionalscholar is perhaps best known to voters for having a32-year-old former beauty contestant as a wife. Butnow, with his boss sliding toward political oblivion,Temer appears hungry to take himself and his partyout of the shadows.

Preparing for big jobTemer, seen as a master operator in the snakepit of

Brasilia’s Congressional politics, played his cards cau-tiously. For months he has been making his displeasureat Rousseff known, including sending a letter inDecember where he complained of feeling underval-ued as “a decorative vice president.” But he was carefulto stay on the fence, even as other PMDB membersopenly attacked Rousseff and pushed ahead theimpeachment momentum.

Occasionally, he let the mask slip, publishing a doc-ument in October called “A bridge to the future” inwhich he criticized the “excesses” in government poli-cies. But while lower-level supporters liked to refer tohim as “President Temer,” he insisted he had no ambi-tions, except perhaps at the next scheduled elections in2018. Then over the last few days the party publicly dis-cussed governing plans in the event of a Rousseff exit.And on Monday, Temer came out into the open, callingon the PMDB to abandon the government and go intoopposition-making good on that threat Tuesday. —AFP

Temer: The man who would

be Brazil’s next president

ATLANTA: Two Republican governors. Twoproposals at the heart of LGBT rights. Onerejection. One new law. Georgia’s Gov NathanDeal said he was preventing discriminationand protecting commerce when heannounced his veto of a measure that wouldhave allowed certain individuals, businessesand faith organizations to deny services basedon “sincerely held religious beliefs.” In NorthCarolina, Gov Pat McCrory said he was protect-ing his citizens’ privacy and using “commonsense” when he signed into law a bill that,among other things, prohibits local anti-dis-crimination ordinances and obligates trans-gender people to use restrooms matching thegender on their birth certificates.

Their moves highlight a familiar GOP faultline between business conservatives, led bylarge corporations that have embraced LGBTrights, and social conservatives, who haveramped up their calls for their own legal pro-tections since the US Supreme Court legalizedsame-sex marriage last year. The tussle is par-ticularly fierce in statehouses like those inAtlanta and Raleigh, where the GOP holdsoverwhelmingly majorities. “There was noescape hatch,” former Deal aide BrianRobinson said. “He was getting torn betweentwo factions ... both of which have supportedhim strongly for years.”

Political realityYet there’s a stark political reality in the

governors’ different conclusions: Deal is a 74-year-old in his second term, unable to a seek athird consecutive term and almost certainnever to face Georgia voters again; McCrory isa 59-year-old running for re-election, with anewfound general election issue smolderingin his lap. So Deal was free to wax eloquentMonday about constitutional freedoms, large-ly avoiding explicit commentary on same-sexmarriage and LGBT rights as he explained hisdecision. “If indeed our religious liberty is con-ferred by God and not by man-made govern-ment, we should heed the ‘hands-off’ admoni-tion of the First Amendment to ourConstitution,” he said. The veto disappointedsome religious conservatives and enragedothers, all of them promising to press the mat-ter again. But Deal stood his ground, alludingto his own lifelong Southern

Baptist affiliation. “I do not think we have todiscriminate against anyone,” he said, “to pro-tect the faith-based community.” Conversely,McCrory now must try to frame the new NorthCarolina law in his favor, while his Democraticgeneral election opponent, North CarolinaAttorney General Roy Cooper, does the same.The challenge for both men is to placate theirrespective party bases - gay-rights supportingliberals for Cooper, social conservatives forMcCrory - while appealing to independentswho hold sway in the closely divided state.

Multistall bathroomsMcCrory and his aides focus on provisions

that require people to use multistall bathroomsof the sex matching their birth certificates atstate agencies, schools and universities. Thelaw was the product of a special sessionRepublicans called essentially to override a cityof Charlotte ordinance allowing transgenderindividuals to use the bathroom assigned totheir gender identity. Chris LaCivita, McCrory’schief campaign strategist, said it’s a simplequestion: “Can a male use a female bathroomand a female locker room?” LaCivita saidMcCrory “has always maintained that this is acase about reasonable expectations of privacy.”Opponents of an anti-discrimination ordinancein Houston successfully used the same argu-ments in a 2015 referendum.

Cooper answered Tuesday that the NorthCarolina law is a “national embarrassment,” andhe said he would not defend it as attorney gen-eral against a pending federal lawsuit. He andother Democrats also tried to define the bill bymore than transgender bathroom access. Thelaw blocks workers from suing in state courtsover workplace discrimination based on race,religion, color, national origin, age, sex or hand-icap; and it bars local anti-discrimination meas-ures to protect people on the basis of sexualorientation or gender identity, while separatelypreventing local governments from settingtheir own minimum wage or requiring busi-nesses to provide paid sick leave.

All that “will set North Carolina’s economyback if we don’t repeal it,” Cooper said, echo-ing the argument business leaders made inpressuring Deal for a veto in Georgia. Morethan 500 companies joined a coalition led byCoca-Cola and other big-name Georgia firms.The Walt Disney Co, Marvel Studios andSalesforce.com threatened to take businesselsewhere. The NFL suggested Atlanta couldlose its bids for the 2019 or 2020 Super Bowl.McCrory heeded such arguments last yearwhen he vetoed a “religious freedom” bill thatwas more limited than what Deal nixed. (TheLegislature overrode McCrory’s veto.)

On Monday, McCrory doubled down, say-ing he’d “not had one corporation tell me thatthey’re threatening to leave,” though the NBAhas now suggested it could move profession-al basketball’s 2017 All-Star game fromCharlotte. Georgia Republican consultantChip Lake said those arguments are what ulti-mately drive the issue, regardless of specificand often complicated provisions thatMcCrory, Cooper, Deal and others try toparse. “We get caught up in arguments ofwhat’s right and what’s wrong, but thisbecomes an issue where we just have to ask,‘Are the economic consequences real or per-ceived?’” Lake said. “You can call it economicextortion. We can talk about ‘that’s unfair,’ butthat’s the reality.” —AP

Two Republican governors,

two different calculations