Brazil president in trouble as top senator quits and says government 'discredited'

Another thread of support has been cut away from Brazil’s scandal-plagued president Michel Temer after the ruling party’s senate leader resigned and declared the government to be “discredited”.

Renan Calheiros quit his post just hours after the supreme court sent a request to the legislature for the president to be put on trial for allegedly accepting millions of dollars in bribes from the meat-packing company JBS.

The departing Senate leader has long been a rival of Temer’s inside the centre-right Brazilian Democratic Movement party and apparently wants to distance himself from the deeply unpopular president ahead of a re-election bid next year.

In a statement to announce his resignation, Calheiros hinted at the power struggles taking place inside the ruling camp. “I have no vocation to be a puppet,” he declared.

The timing could not be worse for the president, whose approval rating has fallen to 7% less than a year after he seized power with an impeachment plot against his predecessor and former running mate Dilma Rousseff of the Workers party.

Earlier this week, Temer became the first president in history to be formally charged with a crime by the attorney general. Based on secretly recorded phone conversations and testimonies from JBS executives, he is accused of taking bribes and trying to obstruct justice by arranging hush-money pay-offs to the jailed former head of the lower house of Congress, Eduardo Cunha.

The supreme court has now sent the corruption charge to Congress. If two-thirds of deputies vote for a trial, the president could be removed from office.

Temer has denied the charges and refused to resign. In a televised address, he accused the attorney general of creating a “fiction” to paralyse the country and hold up his government’s reform program.

But prosecutors are closing in. Eight ministers, four past presidents and dozens of lawmakers – including Calheiros – are either on trial or under investigation by judicial officers working on the Lava Jato (Car Wash) corruption probe.

The ruling camp currently has enough votes to block a trial of Temer, but support is ebbing as allies fear a public backlash ahead of next year’s elections. Last weekend, former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso – an influential figure in the conservative Democratic Socialist party of Brazil – urged the president to stand down for the sake of the country.