SAO PAULO – Washington Post – When Brazilian Vice
President Michel Temer from Lebanese Origins complained to embattled President Dilma Rousseff
that he didn’t like being a “decorative” figure, he was serious. Now he
could take her job. Temer and Rousseff always made an awkward couple. As head of the
centrist PMDB party, Temer represented the biggest force in the leftist
Rousseff’s shaky coalition.

For years, the PMDB has played that kingmaker role, and it worked.
But in March, the party voted to quit the government and go into
opposition, supporting the rush to impeach Rousseff. Impeachment is edging closer, with a crucial vote on Sunday in the
lower house of Congress, which will decide whether to push for an
impeachment trial in the Senate. A last-ditch appeal to the Supreme
Court by Rousseff failed early Friday.

That leaves the dour Temer closing in on the interim presidency, as
required under the constitution should Rousseff be suspended or removed
from office.

The 75-year-old lawyer has a low profile for someone in such a
linchpin position at the top of Latin America’s biggest country and
economy. A constitutional scholar, he is perhaps best known to voters for having a 32-year-old former beauty contestant as a wife.

But now, with his boss possibly sliding toward political oblivion,
Temer appears hungry to take himself and his party out of the shadows.

In fact, Rousseff accuses him of manipulating the impeachment proceedings to rise to the top, calling him a “conspirator.”

Temer, seen as a master operator in the snake pit of Brasilia’s congressional politics, initially played his cards cautiously.

For months he made his displeasure at Rousseff known, 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 the impeachment ahead.

Occasionally he let the mask slip, publishing a document in October
called “A Bridge to the Future” in which he criticized “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 in the next
scheduled elections in 2018.

Finally last month Temer came out into the open, calling on the PMDB to abandon the government and go into opposition.

But nothing was as brazen as the leaking Monday of an audio recording
in which he practices the speech he would give if he replaces Rousseff.

“We are living in strange and worrying times, times of a coup and
pretending and treachery,” Rousseff said Tuesday. “Yesterday they used
the pretense of a leak to give the order for the conspiracy.”

For such a colorless, 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. He has five children born across four decades.

Nor is he the stuffed suit that he might seem 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 apologize 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 may account for his rock-bottom popularity — he would
get just 1 percent of the vote in a presidential race against other
leading figures, according to a recent Datafolha poll.

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