Brasília, April 7

The impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff should go ahead, the representative for a congressional commission said on Wednesday, bringing the country’s political crisis a step closer to a showdown.

Jovair Arantes, rapporteur for a special impeachment commission in the lower house of Congress, said he had concluded the “legal admissibility” of the case against the leftist president.

“The magnitude and scope of the violations made by the president of the republic constitute a serious abuse,” he said.

The decision was given in a lengthy report that Arantes read aloud, live on national television, to the 65-member impeachment commission, sometimes interrupted by deputies shouting and arguing.

Although Arantes’ decision was non-binding and mostly symbolic, it meant the opposition drew first blood just as an increasingly bitter battle to remove Brazil’s first woman president from office gathers pace. On Monday, the full commission will vote its recommendation. Then on April 18, the lower house of Congress meets to hold a decisive vote on whether impeachment will go ahead.

“Today’s vote was expected,” said Mendonca Filho, a deputy from the conservative, pro-impeachment Democratas party. “Now we have to find out the position of the whole commission ... and then we move on to the main battle in the full chamber.” Rousseff is accused of presiding over large-scale fiddling of government accounts to mask the depth of budgetary shortfalls during her re-election in 2014.

The president -- highly unpopular because of a severe recession and a giant corruption scandal enveloping Brazil’s political elite -- says she has committed no impeachment-worthy crime and claims she is the victim of a coup attempt.

Ze Geraldo, from Rousseff’s Workers’ Party, shrugged off the setback, telling AFP, “We are already prepared to lose in the commission, given its make-up.” Intrigue is rife about which way Congress will lean on the 18th.

The lower chamber’s mood swings almost daily, with Rousseff sometimes appearing to have run out of allies before winning an unexpected boost. Rousseff’s ruling coalition took a huge hit last week when the PMDB party, headed by Vice President Michel Temer, went into opposition. Her Workers’ Party is now scrambling to build a new alliance.