by Bruno Gonçalves Rosi
Mises.org
Now it is official: Dilma Rousseff is no longer Brazil’s president. After almost two years of waiting, the country’s senate approved her impeachment. I will try to make here a brief summary of what happened, and write down some of my expectations for Brazil’s near political future.
The details of Brazilian law and Rousseff’s trial can get somewhat complicated, but the basics are that she spent public money she was legally not supposed to, most likely with electoral purposes.
But there are larger policy-based reasons for the opposition she faces, as well. Rousseff has basically a Keynesian economic mentality (I wonder if Brazilian socialists realize how far from Marx they really are), and she publicly claims that her stimulus-based policies were the right answer to the 2008 economic crisis. Rousseff’s time in office has been about spending money, and lots of it.