Bolsonaro denies corruption after release of poll with majority support for his impeachment

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro denied on Saturday (10) any case of corruption in his government, shortly after the release of a poll showing that, for the first time, more than half of the population is in favor of Congress opening an impeachment trial.

According to the Datafolha poll, 54% of Brazilians favor the right-wing leader being subjected to an impeachment trial in Congress that could lead to his removal from office for the different “crimes of accountability” attributed to him. In the poll 42% reject this possibility.

This is the first time that support for impeachment is in the majority among Brazilians, according to Datafolha, which interviewed 2,074 people nationwide between July 7 and 8 for a survey with a margin of error of two percentage points plus or minus.

In May, in a similar survey, those in favor of the impeachment constituted 49%, and those opposed 46%, a technical tie based on the margin of error.

Support for impeachment grew after the Covid CPI (investigative committee), created by the Senate to verify alleged omissions and failures in the government’s management of the Covid pandemic, discovered evidence of corruption and misappropriations in the purchase of vaccines against the coronavirus.

The creation of this Brazilian Covid CPI alone is a unique process, unparalleled in the world.

In recent weeks, allegations of high-level officials demanding bribes to approve contracts to purchase vaccines and of nebulous negotiations with suspicious intermediaries connected with these acquisitions have been aired.

One of the accusers interviewed by the Covid CPI, Congressman Luis Miranda, claimed that he discovered one of these corrupt practices and reported it to President Bolsonaro, who promised to take action to investigate the irregularity, but ultimately did not.

For such alleged omission, the Supreme Court authorized the Prosecutor’s Office to open an investigation against the president for dereliction of duty. This in itself has tarnished the image of the conservative leader, who won the 2018 elections with the promise to fight corruption, making harsh attacks on the illegalities discovered in the prior administrations of presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff.

“It’s been two and a half years without corruption. They want to charge me now with a crime of corruption even though not a single dose of these vaccines was bought,” said the head of state on Saturday in statements made to supporters in the southern city of Porto Alegre.

According to the president, the suspicious contracts were suspended by the supervising agencies because “we have a filter, we have control”, which prevented the purchase of vaccines in the investigated businesses.

On the allegation that he did not ask the police to investigate the corruption after being alerted to it by Congressman Miranda, Bolsonaro said that he could not take preventive measures based on his information.

“This is a fantasy story that only serves for three senators (members of Covid CPI) to promote themselves politically,” he said. The majority of Covid CPI members are self-described political independents or opponents of the president.

Before he was besieged by corruption allegations, Bolsonaro’s image had already deteriorated, due to his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, which was not approved by the international community.

He did not follow the mainstream narrative of Covid-19 control  where isolation, containment, forced business closures, masks, and other preventive measures are the rule.

Bolsonaro’s opponents are claiming it is the President’s fault that Brazil has more than 520,000 covid deaths and became one of the countries most affected by the pandemic in the world.

520,000 is an enormous number, even if Brazil is a country of continental dimension. If the number of deaths per million is considered, Brazil ranks seventh among the ten most affected nations like Peru, the Czech Republic, Colombia, Argentina, Italy, and Belgium.