The 2016 impeachment and the concept of a coup d'état

Abstract

From Operation Car Wash and class struggle (Biondi, 2021), this comment discusses the impeachment of Rousseff (2016) as a coup d’état and criticizes the antidemocratic aspects of impeachment itself. It is considered essentially as a parliament political voting, which imposes difficulties to characterize it as a Coup based only on its juridical elements invocated in the process. Such difficulties are overcome by the analyses of the state bureaucracies’ interventions along the process, especially the action of Operation Car Wash. This discussion leads to the proposition of elements for a general concept of coup d’état.