Impeachment seems to be one of politics and Hollywood’s latest trends. With Donald Trump infamously becoming the third President in American history to be impeached, another historical impeachment is currently making headlines.
The most recently announced Oscar nomination for the Brazilian documentary depicting the impeachment of then Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has shed unprecedented light upon the polarization within Latin America’s “largest democracy.”
Brilliantly titled The Edge of Democracy, and as reported by The Daily Star, filmmaker Petra Costa “uses her personal story to argue that Brazil’s democracy is at risk after the abrupt end to governments led by the Workers’ Party between 2003 and 2016.”
Leftists have maintained their argument that the accusation of “fiscal manipulation” of the budget against Rousseff is not a crime and not an “impeachable offense.”
On a separate note, their political rivals, the Rightists, insist that the fiscal manipulation she was accused of was more than enough – especially coupled with the fact that there were enough hindrances in her government to be rid of it entirely anyway.
With Rousseff’s removal in 2016, her conservative and infamously Lebanese Vice-President, Michel Temer, took power as Acting President between 12 May 2016 and 31 August 2016, after which he took office formally until December 2018.
In 2018, far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro defeated him to ultimately win the Presidency.
This is not the first case of impeachment against a Brazilian President in the country’s history.
Brazil’s congress has also impeached President Fernando Collor de Mello in 1992 for alleged corruption within governmental institutions and on the state level.
Rousseff herself has since issued a statement on the popular documentary, which reads:
“The story of the 2016 coup that removed me from the Presidency through a fraudulent impeachment has taken the world.”
“The movie shows how my removal from power – and the venal media and Brazilian political and economic elites charged against democracy in this country – resulted in the rise of a far-right candidate in 2018”.
How about we let audiences decide what they think was right here? The political documentary has been a sensation since its release in June 2019, and it’s now available on Netflix.
