“Tomorrow, it will be you,” Eduardo Cunha told his fellow lawmakers in his last speech to Brazil’s lower house. A few hours later, just before midnight on a Monday in September 2016, they voted him out by 450 to 10, with nine abstentions. Some deputies held up their fingers like prison bars. Others chanted “Fora Cunha!”, Cunha out.
It ended the career of the man who had steered Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment through the chamber. Rousseff had been removed from office less than two weeks earlier.
From radio host to speaker
Cunha is a trained economist and a protégé of Fernando Collor, the only president impeached before Rousseff since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985. He converted to the Assembly of God, one of Brazil’s largest evangelical churches, and made his name hosting a radio show on an evangelical station. With the Christian right behind him he won a seat in the chamber of deputies for Rio de Janeiro in 2003 and became speaker in 2015.
His power rested on knowing other politicians’ secrets and on his hold over campaign money. AFP noted that even critics respected him as a backroom operator, and that he was often compared to Frank Underwood of “House of Cards”.
The unraveling
The lower house voted heavily last year to open an impeachment trial against Rousseff on charges that she illegally manipulated government accounts. Cunha’s own troubles came fast. The Supreme Court charged him with corruption in the Petrobras bribery scandal, the only sitting lawmaker so far to face such a charge, Reuters reported. In May it removed him temporarily from the speakership, saying he had used the post to obstruct the investigation.
On 7 July he quit the chair altogether. Speaking with a cracking voice, he said he was being made a scapegoat. “I am paying a high price for having launched the impeachment,” he told reporters. A commentator at Globo, Gerson Camarotti, said Cunha had jumped before he was pushed.
The ethics committee had by then recommended stripping him of his seat and barring him from politics for eight years for lying about Swiss bank accounts. Its rapporteur, Marcos Rogerio, said the evidence was indisputable that the accounts were “instruments to conceal tax evasion, launder money and receive kickbacks”. The money, he said, came from an inflated Petrobras purchase of an oil field in Benin. The Guardian reported that Cunha was accused of stashing around $1.3m in illegal kickbacks, and of living far beyond his declared annual income of $120,000. Cunha denied wrongdoing.
What the vote meant
The expulsion stripped him of parliamentary immunity, a protection that had kept his case before the Supreme Court, where cases can drag on for years. It also carried the eight-year ban from politics. That is harsher than Rousseff’s fate: she was thrown out of office but kept her political rights.
Cunha called the vote “political vengeance” and said he was paying for freeing the country of the Workers’ Party. Public feeling ran strongly the other way. A Datafolha poll earlier that year found 77% of voters wanted him stripped of his mandate, against 61% to 67% for Rousseff. Only two deputies came to the microphone to defend him.
He said he planned a book about his role in the impeachment. Asked whether he had recorded private conversations, as other politicians had, he replied that he did not need to: “I have a good memory.”
Sources
- Brazilian politician who led Rousseff impeachment is expelled from office (The Guardian)
- Leader of Rousseff impeachment drive resigns Brazil speaker's post (AFP, via Digital Journal)
- Brazil's Suspended Lower House Speaker Resigns (Reuters, via VOA News)
