Michel Temer

Biography

Michel Temer is a Brazilian lawyer and politician who was president of Brazil from 2016 to 2018. Born in Tietê, São Paulo, to Lebanese immigrant parents, he studied law at the University of São Paulo and later earned a doctorate at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, where he taught constitutional law and wrote widely used textbooks.

He entered public life in São Paulo state as attorney general and as secretary of public security in the 1980s and early 1990s. A long-serving member of the Brazilian Democratic Movement, he sat in the Chamber of Deputies for most of the period from 1987 to 2010 and was twice elected its president. He also led his party nationally for many years.

Temer was elected vice president on Dilma Rousseff's ticket in 2010 and re-elected in 2014. When the Chamber voted to open impeachment proceedings in 2016 he became acting president, and he took office in full when the Senate removed Rousseff in August. His government pursued a public spending cap and a labour reform but faced very low approval and corruption accusations. After leaving office he was briefly arrested in 2019 in an investigation linked to Operation Car Wash.