Dilma Rousseff tried to make it look like business as usual today with a visit to the Rio Olympics site, but time was running out for the Brazilian president ahead of a key impeachment vote.
The inspection trip to Rio, including an inauguration ceremony for the Olympic swimming center, was a bitter-sweet occasion for a president who no longer knows if she'll even be in power when the Summer Games kick off August 5.
The Olympics, the first ever staged in South America, were awarded back in 2009 when Brazil was an emerging markets high flier and Rousseff's leftist mentor, Luiz Inacio Lula daSilva, was one of the most popular presidents in the world.
Now Rousseff is fighting desperately ahead of an impeachment vote in Congress while ex-president Lula faces corruption charges.
Rousseff stood with other officials at the side of the sparkling Olympic pool and sung the national anthem.
But she was due to return to a grimmer reality by the day in the capital Brasilia, where a congressional commission is preparing to vote Monday on whether to recommend her removal from office.
A week later, comes a vote by the lower house of Congress, where a two thirds majority would send Rousseff to a full impeachment trial in the Senate.
She is accused of breaking the law by juggling government accounts to disguise the depth of budget shortfalls during her 2014 reelection.
Rousseff argues that this relatively technical accusation does not amount to an impeachable offense.
However, momentum for her removal is being fueled by a massive recession, political paralysis, and a sprawling corruption scandal that together have reduced the Rousseff government's approval ratings to around 10 per cent.
Rousseff's opponents sense that the country's first female president, a former Marxist guerrilla who was tortured under a military dictatorship, is as good as finished.
"We are living in a situation where the government does not govern and the president of the republic is no longer the president," said Moreira Franco, a former minister from the centrist PMDB party which was until recently allied with Rousseff's Workers' Party but now supports impeachment.
"The president is isolated in the palace and the nation has repeatedly demonstrated its disgust for her," he told Folha newspaper.
However Rousseff, who calls the impeachment a coup attempt, still hopes to engineer a famous comeback.
