by Our Foreign Desk

THE LARGEST party in Brazil’s governing coalition walked out on Tuesday in the latest attempt at soft regime change against President Dilma Rousseff.

The Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) not only quit the left-wing government but ordered some 600 of its members in the civil service to leave their jobs.

PMDB Senator Romero Juca told a meeting of the party’s MPs: “No-one in the country is authorised to hold any federal position in name of the PMDB.”

The meeting ended with members chanting for the overthrow of Ms Rousseff and her replacement by Vice-President Michel Temer, the PMDB leader.

With 69 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 18 in the Senate, the PMDB was the largest component of the the 16-party, 365-member coalition led by the Ms Rousseff’s Workers’ Party (PT).

The split still leaves the government with a majority in the 513-seat lower house of parliament, although it no longer controls the 81-seat Senate.

Calls for Ms Rousseff to go over the “Car Wash” bribery scandal at state oil company Petrobras began last year.

But PMDB Chamber of Deputies speaker Eduardo Cunha, dubbed the president’s “nemesis,” has been indicted while impeachment proceedings have so far failed.

Earlier this month, Ms Rousseff’s predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s name was also dragged through the mud in an alleged property scandal — just after he had indicated that he may stand for the presidency again in 2018.

The PT has dismissed the allegations as an attempted legalistic coup against the government that has made Brazil an economic power and member of the BRICS bloc — a rival to US and European hegemony.

“The law and the constitution foresee that to remove the president there must be a fiscal crime and there isn’t one,” said Agrarian Development Minister Afonso Florence.

“That is why impeachment is a coup, but not only a coup against the president, but also against democratic legality.”

Ms Rousseff’s chief of staff Jaques Wagner welcomed the PMDB walkout as “an opportunity to reconsolidate her government. In other words, to start a new government.”