Rousseff says biding time on Brazil cabinet reshuffle
Brazil's embattled President Dilma Rousseff said Tuesday she will not launch a widely anticipated cabinet shake-up until after the lower house of Congress votes on whether to impeach her.
A long recession and huge corruption scandal have pushed the leftist leader's government to the brink of collapse, exacerbated last week when her main coalition partner, the PMDB party, went over to the opposition.
The break-up left Rousseff scrambling to cement alliances with other parties and avoid a two-thirds vote in the Chamber of Deputies to open an impeachment trial in the Senate.
Ministerial posts and other government jobs are key bargaining chips in the frenzied negotiations.
But Rousseff said she would not reshuffle her cabinet before the lower house vote, which is expected in mid-April.
"The (presidential) palace does not plan to carry out any ministerial restructuring before a vote in the Chamber. We won't touch anything for now," Rousseff told journalists.
Rousseff's chief of staff had said last week a reshuffle was imminent.
But newspaper O Globo reported that the president's camp was reluctant to move too soon out of fears that supposed new allies could betray her and vote to impeach anyway.
Rousseff, 68, is accused of manipulating the government's accounts to boost public spending during her 2014 re-election campaign and hide the depth of the recession.
Attorney General Jose Eduardo Cardozo lambasted the case against her Monday in final arguments before a congressional committee tasked with recommending whether to impeach.
Cardozo accused the president's opponents of violating the constitution and seeking to exact revenge for their own legal woes in a spiraling graft scandal centered on state oil company Petrobras.
Rousseff needs at least 172 abstentions or votes against impeachment in the lower house.
The PMDB, a centrist juggernaut that had long been an awkward partner for her Workers' Party (PT), has 69 seats in the lower house and 18 in the 82-member Senate, where a two-thirds vote in an impeachment trial would remove the president from office.