Temer is Fora: Corruption and Memes More Effective in Bringing Down Regimes than Slogans and Protest?
While the world has watched Donald Trump’s descent into more and more probable impeachment this past week, Brazil has been experiencing its own Watergate-like scandal. Though I say ‘Watergate-like’, the crimes committed by top Brazilian politicians are in fact much more akin to those of murderous gangsters than to those of party politics. A recording was leaked to the press of President Michel Temer, who succeeded ex-President Dilma Rousseff after her impeachment in May 2016, endorsing entrepreneur Joesley Batista to bribe a jailed a politician in exchange of his silence. Eduardo Cunha, ex-President of the Chamber of Deputies, was arrested in October 2016 for hiding bribes in a Swiss bank account, and it appears the money flow has not stopped since. Though Temer has explicitly denied these charges (shouting ‘I WILL NOT RESIGN’ and waiving his index finger in the manner of a military dictator in pajamas), claiming the recordings are false, the Order of Attorneys of Brazil (OAB) has formally requested his impeachment with the Chamber of Deputies.
Needless to say, this was an internet bombshell. El País even ran an article about how memes are the only fully functional institution in Brazil. Indeed, with no equivalent to a Colbert Report or a Daily Show on national television (other than internet spin-offs), memes, like protests, are the valves by which popular sentiment can be gauged.
House of Cards officially tweeted in Portuguese: It’s hard to compete.
"So that’s where the trouble began.
That smile
That damn smile.’
As I have written about previously for Mangal Media, Temer has been the most hated politician of the Brazilian Left since his replacement of Rousseff, and has been the object of the popularmantra #ForaTemer (‘Out with Temer’) for the past year. As an effort against normalization of his presidency, Fora Temer was shouted in virtually all cultural and political gatherings; all political protests the past year have carried the hashtag.
Yet it was not popular pressure which succeeded in ousting Temer from power. It was a billionaire businessman and the same media corporation which put him in power in the first place, Rede Globo. What happened on May 17th is a great testament to the fact that one year of hundreds of protests and of millions of people shouting a mantra against the government has no political effect whatsoever. The only players in the game are predefined. The popular protests of the past year have only been met with police brutality, rather than any sign of an impeachment hearing. If Joesley Batista (pronounced: ‘Joe’-‘Wesley’, yes, the name of a man who’s brother is named‘Wesley;), one of the 70 main billionaires of Brazil, hadn’t decided to turn against Temer, there would be no change. And what pushed Joesley? The owner of JBS, the largest meat-packing company in the world, had seen his company investigated by the Federal Police for bribery and for mixing rotten meat into its sales, hiding the taste with acid (as a response to the scandal, Michel Temer invited ambassadors to a dinner of imported meat). As a result of the recordings, Joesley now expects a lessening of his fine. As though he hadn’t already made billions by selling off shares of JBS and buying dollars the day before the release of the recordings, which caused stocks and the real, Brazil’s currency, to plunge.
The grim reality is that it wasn’t #ForaTemer or popular action which took down a corrupt president, but the greed of a businessman. Some question why the media empire Globo, which had supported Temer’s presidency and ignored all opposition, took a major political U-turn on May 17th, with the National News’ main newscaster and editor William Bonner (pronounced ‘Bó-ner’) already calling him the ‘ex’-president. Some just call it a political bet, but some say that it’s a great scheme to keep the Temer’s right-wing policies in place with a new face.
Yet another wave of protests has erupted across the country since May 17th, calling for Temer’s impeachment, something which will likely happen, and for direct elections, something which will likely not. It is set in the Brazilian Constitution that if the Vice-President is impeached, the President of the Chamber of Deputies is automatically next in the line of succession – someone elected by the deputies themselves, in utter disproportion to Brazil’s population. The person exercising the function is Rodrigo Maia, who, like all the politicians cited in this article, is cited in Operation Car Wash.
The most recent events in Brazil go to show the thin façade of democracy behind which powerful groups of interest command. It makes one wonder the point of protests. For some, they are testament to the perseverance of the fight against authority, as the Vice Brazil headline reads, ‘There was no resignation, but there were protests’. For others, the one redemption is that, even outside of Carnaval season, one can always go to a protest sure to find friends and ambulant beer vendors.