Sao Paulo: Michel Temer used to be known in Brazil as a behind-the-scenes operator, but that was before he pulled the trigger on a masterful bid to topple his boss, President Dilma Rousseff, and take her job.
After months of playing his cards close to his chest, the vice-president was to take over as president yesterday after the Senate voted to open an impeachment trial against Rousseff.
Temer, a constitutional scholar who kept a low profile until now, takes her place. Rousseff’s running mate-turned-nemesis was due to announce a business-friendly cabinet and announce plans to pivot away from 13 years of leftist policy in a bid to get the ailing South American giant’s economy out of recession.
But with popularity ratings as dismal as Rousseff’s and many of his allies implicated in corruption, Temer will face a tall task restoring stability in Brazil. But as Brazil’s economic boom turned to spectacular bust and a corruption scandal at state oil company Petrobras tainted nearly the entire political class, Temer slowly emerged from the shadows to seize the starring role.
Rousseff and her running mate always made an awkward couple. As head of the PMDB, a centrist party, Temer represented the biggest force in the former leftist guerrilla’s shaky coalition. For years, the PMDB played the role of kingmaker, content with pulling the strings and keeping the keys to the government pork barrel. Temer was cautious, gradually making his disapproval of Rousseff known as the momentum to impeach her built.
In October, he published a document called “A bridge to the future” in which he criticised “excesses” in government policies. And in December, he complained of being treated as “a decorative vice president.” But while lower-level PMDB supporters liked to refer to him as “President Temer,” he insisted he had no such ambitions, except perhaps for the next scheduled elections in 2018. Finally, in March, he came out into the open, calling on the PMDB to abandon the government and go into opposition.
Temer followed that up by brazenly leaking an audio recording of himself practising the speech he’d give if he were to replace Rousseff. In it, he said his “great mission from now is the calming of the country, the unification of the country.”
For a colourless political insider, Temer has a surprising side. Not only is he married to a woman less than half his age, but it is his third marriage. He has five children in four decades.
Temer is a Lebanese-Brazilian. Officials estimate that between seven million and 10 million people in Brazil have Lebanese ancestry. The new Brazilian president is one of them. His parents left Lebanon in the 1920s for Brazil, where Temer was born. “My father always said that Brazil is the place to ‘make America,’ and by ‘make America’ he meant the place to grow — to prosper,” CNN quoted him yesterday as telling Lebanon’s Executive magazine in 2014.
Since taking office in Brazil, Temer has visited Lebanon a few times. Residents of Btaaboura, the small town in northern Lebanon where Temer’s family has roots, are big fans of the Brazilian official, according to local media. There’s already a street named after him there. Nor is he the stuffed suit that he might appear to be on television. In addition to a highly regarded work on constitutional law, the son of Lebanese immigrants has written a book of poetry.
