Do we like them?

Do we like Dilma Rousseff?

Our score: 6 out of 10. A resilient, decent-looking record with one real LGBTQ+ stain and a sketchy BRICS photo-op habit, and we couldn't read every source we wanted.

Dilma grew up comfortably in Belo Horizonte, the daughter of a Bulgarian businessman father and a Brazilian mother. Then the 1964 military coup happened and she became a Marxist militant against the dictatorship. She was arrested in January 1970, and she says she was tortured with electric shocks over nearly three years in custody.

She joined the Workers' Party in 2000, ran Lula's energy ministry and his cabinet, chaired Petrobras, and in 2010 became Brazil's first female president. In 2016 the Senate removed her over accounting manoeuvres to plug budget gaps. She called it a coup and vowed to resist to the very end, so how you read that depends on whether you see a legal removal or a political one.

On the harm check, we found no hateful words from her about LGBTQ+ people, women or migrants. The blemish is real though: in May 2011 she suspended distribution of an anti-homophobia kit for schools after pushback from evangelical lawmakers, which LGBTQ+ groups called a capitulation. Her environmental record, including the Belo Monte dam, drew heavy criticism from green groups, but we couldn't open those pages to check, so we're not scoring it.

Lately she runs the BRICS bank, and in May 2026 she took that to Moscow and met the Kremlin. She has said the bank is a platform for the Global South and warned about instability and go-it-alone policies. That's a job, not a hate campaign, but Putin handshakes won't thrill everyone in our crowd.

The honest verdict: someone who survived prison under a dictatorship, fought back through politics, and never appears to have punched down. The anti-homophobia kit is the stain and it's a big one for this page. She gets a reluctant lean yes, and the record is thinner than we'd like.