SAO PAULO: When Brazil Vice President Michel Temer complained to embattled President Dilma Rousseff that he did not like being a “decorative” figure, he was being serious. Now he could be about to take her job.

Temer and Rousseff always made an awkward couple. As head of the PMDB centrist party, Temer represented the biggest force in leftist Rousseff’s shaky coalition.

For years, the PMDB has played that kingmaker role and it worked. But on Tuesday, the party voted to quit the government and go into opposition, supporting an ever stronger push to impeach Rousseff.

And if she is removed from office, the outwardly dour Temer becomes interim president.

The 75-year-old lawyer has a low profile for someone in such a lynchpin position at the top of Latin America’s biggest country and economy.

If anything, the constitutional scholar is perhaps best known to voters for having a 32-year-old former beauty contestant as a wife. But now, with his boss sliding toward political oblivion, Temer appears hungry to take himself and his party out of the shadows.

Preparing for big job

Temer, seen as a master operator in the snakepit of Brasilia’s Congressional politics, played his cards cautiously.

For months he has been making his displeasure at Rousseff known, including sending a letter in December where he complained of feeling undervalued as “a decorative vice president”. But he was careful to stay on the fence, even as other PMDB members openly attacked Rousseff and pushed ahead the impeachment momentum.

Occasionally, he let the mask slip, publishing a document in October called A bridge to the future in which he criticised the “excesses” in government policies.

But while lower-level supporters liked to refer to him as “President Temer”, he insisted he had no ambitions, except perhaps at the next scheduled elections in 2018.

Then over the last few days the party publicly discussed governing plans in the event of a Rousseff exit.

And on Monday, Temer came out into the open, calling on the PMDB to abandon the government and go into opposition — making good on that threat Tuesday.

Colourful or dour?

For such a colourless, backroom wheeler and dealer, Temer has a surprising side.

Not only is he married to a woman less than half his age, but this is his third marriage and he has five children born across four decades.

Neither is he the stuffed suit that he might appear on television. In addition to a highly regarded work on constitutional law, this child of Lebanese immigrants has authored a book of poetry.

He has served three times as speaker of the lower house of Congress and has been president of the PMDB for 15 years.

Temer does not apologise for his dour manner, telling Piaui magazine in 2010 that joking is not his thing. “I don’t know how to do this. If I tried, it would be a disaster.”

That persona helps account for his rock-bottom popularity — getting just one per cent of the vote if there were a presidential race today against other leading figures, according to a Datafolha poll.

Becoming interim president because of a Rousseff impeachment would be one way for the kingmaker to become the king.—AFP

Published in Dawn, March 31st, 2016