Temer Convicted of Breaking Election Laws As Thousands March for Democracy in Brazil

Upheaval in Brazil continued this week as a court handed down a conviction against right-wing president Michel Temer, who took over after the ouster of leftist president Dilma Rousseff, and banned him from running in elections for the next eight years.

A regional elections court in Temer’s hometown of São Paulo on Thursday “issued a formal decree finding him guilty and declaring him ‘ineligible’ to run for any political office as a result of now having a ‘dirty record’ in elections,” Glenn Greenwald reported in The Intercept.

The decision came less than three weeks after Temer oversaw what has widely been described as a “coup” to overthrow Rouseff, the recently re-elected Workers’ Party president.

“In the scope of the scheming, corruption and illegality from this ‘interim’ government, Temer’s law-breaking is not the most severe offense,” Greenwald notes. “But it potently symbolizes the anti-democratic scam that Brazilian elites have attempted to perpetrate. In the name of corruption, they have removed the country’s democratically elected leader and replaced her with someone who—though not legally barred from being installed—is now barred for eight years from running for the office he wants to occupy.”

As interim president, Temer has swiftly and openly transformed the formerly left-leaning and diverse Brazilian government into one pushing neoliberal, right-wing policies, helmed by an all-white, all-male cabinet. In the New Yorker, Jon Lee Anderson summarized a few of Temer’s decisions that have raised eyebrows worldwide:

“The oozing corruption of Temer’s ministers has sometimes served to obscure his own,” Greenwald writes. “He, too, is implicated in several corruption investigations. And now, he has been formally convicted of violating election laws.”