Former President of the Republic (and current President of the Senate) Sarney has been embroiled in scandal since the beginning of the year. I could say that these scandals seemed to be leaving the headlines, but that statement might be wrong tomorrow. Some new dirt might be dug up and be on the front of Folha de SP in the morning.
There are a few (relatively) honest and admirable Brazilian politicians on the national scene. Sarney (who actually switched states to win his current seat in the Senate; he now represents an even poorer and more underdeveloped state than the one in which he was previously governor) is not among them.
As a side note, there's a joke in Brazil that involves Sarney. Sarney ran as the vice-presidential candidate under Tancredo Neves, who won the first democratic presidency after the 20-year-long military dictatorship. One month before Tancredo Neves was to take office, he died, thus retaining his default title as the greatest president Brazil ever had.
Tancredo Neves's grandson, the current governor of the state of General Mines, is a possible vice-presidential candidate for next year's election.
UPDATE BEFORE SLEEP: I was wrong. The online headline of tomorrow's Folha de Sao Paulo has Sarney accuse his enemies of plotting a "Nazi campaign" against him, and denying that his apartments in Sao Paulo were gifts from a construction firm. (Construction firms are notorious for being the chosen way of laundering money here.)
Some other time, I'll summarize the scandals that brought down the preceding President of the Senate. Those scandals broke when I was here in 2007. Scandals are one reason someone once quipped that, behind football, politics are Latin America's second-most-watched spectator sport.
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