by GLENN GREENWALD & ERICK DAU
PHOTO/Cris Faga/NurPhoto/Getty Images
A new, innovative public campaign aimed at securing the removal of Brazilian President Michel Temer was launched on Monday night with a new website, at 342agora.org.br, designed to enable public pressure on Congress. The site is called “342 Now” — referring to the number of votes needed in the lower House to proceed with an investigation and ultimate removal of Temer — and its complex design allows users to send messages to every Congress member not only by email but also through their platforms on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and wherever else they may be found online.
Up until now, polls have shown that Temer is universally reviled: He reached a record-low 7 percent approval rating in the last Datafolha poll. From the moment he took power upon the impeachment of the country’s elected president, Dilma Rousseff, Temer has been embroiled in serious corruption scandals. But even for Brazil’s permissive political culture, his latest embarrassment has made his presidency unsustainable: the release of audio tapes that capture him approving bribes last March to silence a key witness in the country’s sweeping corruption investigation. Media outlets and even his fellow party members have openly spoken of his impeachment, or resignation, as a fait accompli.
Temer himself has now been formally charged with accepting bribes, making him the first sitting president in Brazil’s history to be a criminal defendant while in office. And he has no friends left in the country other than (a) the Brazilian oligarchs who installed him to impose unpopular austerity measures and (b) the deeply corrupt politicians in Brasília facing their own criminal investigations, who believe that keeping him in power will protect them from their own day of reckoning. Beyond those two (admittedly powerful) groups, the whole country has abandoned Temer.
But Brazilians — exhausted by endless corruption scandals and contemptuous of the entire political class — have not yet taken to the streets to demand his removal. This new site is principally designed to provide anti-Temer voters, who constitute virtually the entire political spectrum, to apply serious pressure to members of Congress, who will vote shortly on Temer’s fate and will see that their political futures are in jeopardy if they stand behind him.
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