Pressure mounting on Brazil’s Temer as support crumbles

Bloomberg

Brazil’s unpopular President Michel Temer has held on to office for over a year after the impeachment of his predecessor, backed mostly by Congress and financial markets. Under the weight of new corruption allegations against him, that support is crumbling.
Temer’s attempts to discredit charges brought against him last week in a corruption probe failed to convince many over the weekend. A key coalition partner, the PSB party, abandoned Temer and joined opposition parties in calling for his resignation. The influential bar association, OAB by its Portuguese acronym, voted in favor of starting an impeachment process against Temer.
“We believe that the president must resign because he no longer has the political, moral, ethical and administrative wherewithal to go on,” said Carlos Siqueira, head of the Brazilian Socialist Party, which was one of the largest in Temer’s coalition.
Other allied parties, which had joined the Temer camp hoping his pro-market reforms would pull the country out of its worst recession by next year’s election, are now looking to the judiciary and to the streets to help decide whether they too should jump ship.
“We’ll wait for the Supreme Court to position itself before we make any decision,” Jose Agripino Maia, head of the DEM party, said in an interview. Temer on Saturday had requested the country’s top court suspend a corruption and cover-up probe against him, arguing that a recording used by the Prosecutor General Rodrigo Janot as evidence had been doctored.