Photo: Escracho protest outside Palácio do Jaburo, official residence of the golpista Michel Temer. Credit: Mídia Ninja).
Translation by Colin Mansell
One of the principal German parties, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which is part of the governing coalition of the country, released a manifesto a short while ago to the international press in which it put itself alongside the Brazilian democratic forces fighting against the coup.
The SPD is the large social democratic party in Europe and one of the largest in the world.
Thanks, SPD!
On the SPD site.
German social democracy is on the side of the Brazilian democracy
In PDF.
Niels Annen, foreign policy spokesperson;
Klaus Barthel, relevant relator:
The SPD party supports all the democratic forces in Brazil which are fighting against anti-political and anti-democratic ideologies, and expects that, through a process of dialogue, a solution to the crisis will be found. The opposition in Brazil should return to the fundamental principles of democracy.
This signifies respecting the results of the elections and the political changes which only take place through the ballot box.
Last Sunday, the Chamber of Deputies of Brazil decided to start the impeachment process against the current president, Dilma Rousseff.
The SPD is accompanying Brazilian politics with serious concern.
Serious cases of corruption in the state oil company Petrobras have shaken the confidence of the public in the Brazilian political system and in its political parties.
It has been proven that the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores – PT) benefitted from illegal funding, but after intense investigations, there is no reliable evidence that Dilma Rousseff or her predecessor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva were involved in the Petrobras scandal.
Ignoring this fact, the Brazilian mainstream media has led a campaign of defamation against the Workers’ Party (PT) and its members, with the aim of prejudicing the creditability and reputation of the party, and of President Rousseff and her predecessor.
Nor is it respected that it was only under the PT administrations of Rousseff and Lula, that the foundations were laid for political and judicial agencies to carry out effective actions against corruption. It is a duty of the judicial system in a democratic state of law to guarantee that no corruption investigation can be transformed into political revenge.
The allegations against Rousseff do not form a sufficient legal basis for impeachment.
Moreover, it was possible to note that they had no weight in the debate and in the nominal vote for the impeachment process.
With impeachment, the opposition abused an important democratic instrument in the Constitution to remove a democratically elected president from her position.
We know that Dilma Rousseff has lost popular and Congress support. The abuse of impeachment, nevertheless, represents a dangerous precedent for Brazilian democracy.
It allows opinion polls and protest marches to supersede constitutional principles and democratic elections.