Former Brazilian president Lula da Silva, if he decided to run again in 2018 as his Workers Party insists, would lose the presidential contest against any of three potential candidates from the leading opposition party, PSDB, (Brazilian Social Democracy) according to a public opinion poll released this week.
Brazil's highest accounting court gave another 15 days for President Dilma Rousseff to respond to accusations she doctored the government accounts last year to hide the deterioration of the country's finances.
Brazil’s unemployment rate rose to 8.3% in the second quarter, according to a release from the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics, IBGE. The ranks of the jobless expanded to 8.4 million people during the April-June period.
Analysts expect Brazil's economy to contract by 2.06% this year, with the inflation rate coming in at 9.29%, the Central Bank said Monday. GDP estimates come from the Boletin Focus, a weekly Central Bank survey of analysts from about 100 private financial institutions on the state of the national economy.
Brazil's government announced on Monday it will slash the number of ministries and reduce its spending, in an effort to show commitment to austerity that could be politically costly for President Dilma Rousseff.
Brazilian Vice President Michel Temer has decided to drop his role as day-to-day political coordinator in Congress for President Dilma Rousseff but is not leaving her government, two sources in the administration said on Monday.
The vice-president of Brazil’s TSE electoral authority has asked for an investigation of President Dilma Rousseff’s 2014 re-election campaign, citing evidence that it may have been financed with money from a corruption scheme at state-run oil firm Petrobras.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel pressed Brazil's government on Thursday to further open its markets to foreign companies, and said she saw an opportunity to reach a free-trade deal between the European Union and the Mercosur trade bloc. Merkel is on a two-day visit to Brazil with a large delegation of government officials and representatives from German companies.
A slump in commodity markets will burden the global economy for some time to come, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff told Germany's Handelsblatt business daily, adding she hoped the Brazilian economy would pick up in a year.
Brazil unions and left groups staged a string of protests in a show of support for President Dilma Rousseff, although turnout was markedly lower than at massive anti-government rallies over the weekend. The protests hit back at the growing push to impeach Rousseff, who less than a year into her second term is struggling for political survival.