Michel Temer was on the cusp of becoming Brazil’s president as the Senate prepares to vote on Wednesday on a motion to impeach Dilma Rousseff.
If Ms Rousseff’s opponents win a simple majority of the 81 senators, she will be suspended for up to six months during a trial and Mr Temer, her vice-president, will assume power.
Yet just a few months ago Mr Temer, 75, dismissed the prospect of Ms Rousseff being impeached for using state funds to plug a hole in the budget — charges she and her party say are politically motivated.
“I don’t think that will go very far,” the vice-president told the Financial Times in December before quickly changing the subject.
Barring any late surprises, the constitutional lawyer and expert backroom political player will take on the task of rescuing Latin America’s largest economy from a deep recession and restoring public faith in a political class devastated by a corruption scandal at Petrobras, the state-run oil company.
It will also thrust the former law professor, whose political poker face hides a more risqué personal life, into the full limelight of the presidency.
Married three times, he began dating his third wife, Marcela, a former model more than 40 years his junior, when she was a teenager. His slightly gothic appearance also led one rival to label him the “butler in the house of terror”.
The youngest son of a Lebanese Christian family that left their native village of Btaaboura in 1925, he was born in Tietê in São Paulo state to a family of rice and coffee growers. Btaaboura named its main thoroughfare “Rua Michel Tamer, vice-president of Brazil” — complete with spelling error — in honour of its political progeny.
After law school, he worked as a professor during the two-decade military dictatorship before entering politics in the 1980s. In 2001, he became leader of the Brazilian Democratic Movement party, or PMDB, a loose grouping of regional politicians prone to pork-barrelling that is now the biggest in congress.
Elected lower house speaker three times, Mr Temer spent years navigating Brazil’s labyrinthine coalition politics. The PMDB allied with Ms Rousseff`s ruling Workers’ party (PT) in 2007 and he was chosen as her vice-president when she was elected in 2011.
The first few years passed quietly before tensions with Ms Rousseff burst into public view last year when a leaked letter from Mr Temer revealed his frustration that the president was keeping him and his party out of decision-making.
In a document that read like a notice of divorce, he decried how he had been treated as a “decorative” vice-president, kept out of important meetings with the likes of Joe Biden, the US vice-president, ignored when he suggested appointments and treated with “an absolute lack of trust”.
His differences with the statist Ms Rousseff were underlined in a liberal economic plan he published last year that envisages reforming many holy grails of the left such as pensions and labour laws. It even introduced a form of zero-based budgeting championed by Jorge Paulo Lemann, the billionaire beer baron, that would require all government expenses to be justified from scratch every year.
He kept a low profile last year as Eduardo Cunha, lower house speaker and an ally, launched the impeachment motion. As chief beneficiary of the move — the vice-president automatically assumes power should the president be removed from office — he did not want to be seen to be grasping for power.
But he committed gaffes. In another leak, a video of him practising an acceptance speech should Ms Rousseff be impeached emerged online in April, reinforcing her depiction of him as a “conspirator” and “usurper”.
Personable but businesslike, glimpses of his private life reveal an emotional side of the man who would be Brazil’s 40th president.
The author of numerous staid books on constitutional law, one of his most recent works was a poetry collection. “What desire is this that leads you to denude yourself, to unmask yourself,” he writes in Exposition.
In an interview with the Brazilian magazine TPM, his wife also recounted how right after he dropped her home following their first date, Mr Temer rang her proclaiming: “Te amo, te amo, te amo” — “I love you, I love you, I love you”.
“To me it’s like he is 30 [years old],” she said of their age difference, adding she thought him “extremely charming” at their first meeting.
If, as expected, Mr Temer assumes Brazil’s presidency this week, he will have to harness that charm to put a country injured by economic recession and divided by political odium back on its feet.
Yet he may yet find himself dragged into the Petrobras scandal, having been mentioned by some witnesses in the investigation, although he is not officially under investigation and has denied wrongdoing.
He is also not expected to remain as president for long, telling the FT in December that he would not put himself forward for elections set for 2018: “I am past all that,” he said.
In another of his poems, an exchange apparently between two people about why they have boarded a ship without a destination could point to the dilemma facing Brazil as an unelected president prepares to lead a country politically adrift and perplexed by its fall from grace.
“You,” Mr Temer writes in Boarding, “because you didn’t know where you wanted to go, and I because I have already gone in so many different directions and ended up nowhere.”
(Published by Financial Times - May 11, 2016)