Following the decision of the Brazilian Congress’s lower chamber, the Senate voted 55 to 22 the other day to suspend President Dilma Rousseff from duty, as long as she is being investigated on charges of populism, corruption, and offshore money laundering.
The most likely next step is impeachment.
The French media are saying that the middle class has thus responded to Ms. Rousseff’s irresponsible actions, when her slogans to protect the poor segments of society resulted in a total wreck of Brazil’s economy.
This also awaits us if not in 2018-19 then in 2020…
Parallels are more than obvious here.
The Brazilian president’s impeachment story has also a Ukrainian component. Ukraine and Brazil began in 2004 to carry out a joint project, Alcantara Cyclone Space, which envisaged the use of the Ukrainian Tsyklon 4 launch vehicle.
Ukraine has spent USD564 million to fund the joint project, while this has cost Brazilian taxpayers about USD236 million.
On July 24, 2015, Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff issued Decree No. 8494 under which the Brazilian side unilaterally withdrew from the project.
Meeting the members of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies and Senate on a visit in November 2015, a Ukrainian parliamentary delegation raised the question of violations and misuses, also from the Brazilian side, during the construction of the Alcantara Launch Center and, as a result, the losses that Ukraine and Brazil had incurred due to the project cancellation. The facts of launch center construction misuses were made public later and underlay the accusations against Ms. Rousseff.
And what about Ukraine?
The project cost Ukrainian taxpayers a staggering 14 billion hryvnias, about a half of Kyiv city’s annual budget, including a state-guaranteed ten-year loan of USD150 million that was issued in 2004. But this proved to be not enough, and an additional state-guaranteed USD240 million was loaned in 2012.
Following the above-mentioned visit to Brazil, the MPs officially informed the president, prime minister, and prosecutor general of Ukraine about the misdeeds that certain officials had committed during the project implementation and about tremendous losses inflicted on the Ukrainian state. The Prosecutor General’s Office announced that it had instituted criminal proceedings, particularly, in the cases when insurance agreements were concluded. Yet no accusations were made against the concrete officials in charge of this project, including Cabinet ministers, the former head of the National Space Agency of Ukraine, and managers of the state-run Pivdenne design bureau. As always, the budget of Ukraine or, to be more exact, its taxpayers, had to shoulder the burden of the governmental officials’ irresponsibility.
In other words, in Brazil, Alcantara Cyclone Space misappropriations worth USD236 million are among the grounds for the president’s impeachment, while in Ukraine, where the amount of losses is twice as large, everything was quietly shifted to Ukraine’s national budget and everyone is “clean”! With all the conditions being equal, the price of President Rousseff’s impeachment is twice as high for Ukrainians.
This phenomenon is in fact much more serious. As I said above, the root cause of President Rousseff’s impeachment process is a defiant attitude of the powerful local middle class to the policy of populism and corruption, which triggered the “cooling” of the economy of this huge Latin American state against the backdrop of a raw material market slump.
In Ukraine, where the situation is absolutely the same, all ended up with a small simulation (on paper) of bringing somebody to justice.
In contrast to Brazil, there is almost no class of national bourgeoisie in Ukraine, while populism and a phony fight against corruption are typical of almost all political players, irrespective of their party programs and no matter whether they belong to the government or the opposition. For this reason, politicians feel almost no responsibility for the state’s future and are unaware of the grave dangers of tomorrow, although tendencies are similar in the two countries.
Viktor Romaniuk is Member of the Ukrainian Parliament
