Brazil: Why has Cunha accepted the request for Dilma's impeachment?

The President [Speaker] of the Brazilian parliament, Eduardo Cunha is manoeuvring in an attempt to save his own skin. [Cunha has been charged with taking millions in bribes in connection with a kickbacks scheme that has embroiled state-run oil company Petrobras.] What does his acceptance of the request to initiate impeachment against Dilma mean? And what position should the working class adopt?

On December 2nd, the PT (Workers’ Party) parliamentary group in the House of Representatives met in the morning and decided that the three members of the party who are on the Ethics Committee should vote in favor of opening the process to investigate the President of the Chamber, Eduardo Cunha.

Subsequently, there was a joint session (of the House and Senate) to decide on the reduction of the fiscal target for 2015 which would allow the government to end the year with a deficit of R$ 119 billion. The government managed to get a majority and the project was passed, despite the PSDB obstruction and the rest of the opposition.

Some blogs reported that while this was happening Cunha was meeting with PSDB president Aécio Neves. Whether or not the meeting occurred, the fact that triggered the action of Cunha was the position taken by PT deputies in the Ethics Committee, despite the pressure from the Presidential Palace [that is, Dilma’s] to save Cunha.

The decision taken by Cunha - to allow Dilma’s impeachment proceedings to start - does not correspond to the interests of the majority faction of the bourgeoisie. After all, this government bows entirely to their wishes and makes sure the laws that the ruling class needs are passed. The return of the CPMF tax on financial transactions, the budget cuts in social spending, the commitment to discuss the pension “reform”, i.e. the fiscal adjustment is being carried out by the government. And precisely at this time, because of a "little personal problem", Cunha disrupts everything? The truth is that the possibility of impeachment increases instability which is not good for business.

The Marxist Left does not support this manoeuvre by Cunha to save his own skin, nor the actions of the whole of the bourgeois parliamentary opposition (PSDB and others) that would even be prepared to sell their own grandmother to the devil in order to come to power. At the same time, we are not in solidarity with Dilma, nor do we support her projects of attacks on workers.

We stand against Dilma’s impeachment project. It is not in the interests of the working class. Those who have the right to bring down this government are the organized workers and not the bourgeois opposition allied with opportunists who just want to save their own skins.

We are with the workers who are on strike today in various parts of the country to defend their wages and jobs. We are with the school students who occupy schools in São Paulo in defence of education and against the attacks by governor Alckmin.

We are together building a left alternative to open the way to brush aside all the accumulated rubbish that the bourgeoisie pours into the congress halls and other palaces in Brasilia.

Marxist Left, Brazilian section of the IMT, December 3, 2015