Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff scrambled on Wednesday to hold together her crumbling ruling coalition by negotiating key government posts with remaining allies, aides said, as key partners discussed abandoning her amid impeachment proceedings.
A day after Rousseff’s biggest coalition partner broke away and ordered its six ministers in her cabinet to resign, another coalition ally - the Progressive Party (PP) - convened a meeting for April 11-12 to decide whether to leave as well.
A presidential aide said the government was reaching out to individual members of allied parties to offer positions that have opened up after the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) bolted on Tuesday.
With the lower house of Congress due to vote in mid-April on whether Rousseff should stand trial in the Senate for allegedly manipulating government accounts to win re-election in 2014, the PMDB’s decision on Tuesday to abandon her government was a heavy blow.
Rousseff needs one-third of the 513 votes in the chamber in her favour to halt impeachment, but support for her administration has been undermined by Brazil’s worst economic recession in decades and its biggest ever corruption scandal.
In an apparent revolt against the PMDB’s withdrawal, Agriculture Minister Katia Abreu said in a Twitter post that she would stay in the Cabinet as long as Rousseff needed her.
Government sources said the other five PMDB ministers would also stay for the time being, but their positions would be forfeit if Rousseff needed to use the portfolios to shore up support with other parties.
The loss of the PP, which has 49 seats in the lower house, would make it all but impossible for Rousseff to muster the 171 votes needed to avoid impeachment.
