Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff was stripped of the country’s presidency in an impeachment vote on Wednesday (Thursday in Manila) and replaced by her bitter rival Michel Temer, shifting Latin America’s biggest economy sharply to the right. Her trial, instead, focused on creative accounting – a charge she admits to and defends herself for by maintaining that Brazilian Presidents have been doing it for years. Her conservative former Vice President Michel Temer, who has run the country since her suspension in May, will be sworn to serve out the remainder of her term through 2018.
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Speaking to supporters at the presidential residence, Rousseff promised to mount a strong opposition, but didn’t elaborate. “They have convicted an innocent person and carried out a parliamentary coup”, she said, defiantly vowing that she’d “be back”, she said.
So far he’s struggled in the almost four months he’s served as interim president following Rousseff’s May impeachment, which suspended her from office while a final trial was prepared.
Leftist Rousseff, 68, was accused of taking illegal state loans to patch budget holes in 2014, masking the country’s economic problems. She was imprisoned, tortured and spent three years in prison in the early 1970s.
Cheers – and cries of disappointment – erupted in the blue-carpeted, circular Senate chamber as the impeachment verdict flashed up on the electronic voting screen.
The heir to former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Rousseff was re-elected by a narrow margin in 2014, but a recession and a cross-party corruption scandal put an end to any political goodwill she might have earned, eventually leading to her ouster. The municipal elections marked a clear shift in voter behaviour, where ‘no vote’ was the preferred option for around 3 million ANC voters, and one could say the ball is firmly back in their court. Police fired tear gas at some supporters of the former leader in an attempt to quell the protests.
A few hundred protested peacefully in central Rio de Janeiro, waving flags and yelling “Temer out!”
So far that message hasn’t resonated with most Brazilians, however. But their Workers’ Party became bogged down in corruption and a deep economic slump.
Rousseff’s opponents hailed her removal as paving the way for a change of fortunes for Brazil.
Sen. Lindbergh Farias of the Workers’ Party made an impassioned plea against Rousseff’s impeachment.
Senator Romero Juca from Temer’s center-right PMDB party said he expected an appeal to the decision to allow Rousseff to eventually re-enter politics.
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Long known as an uncharismatic backroom wheeler-dealer, Michel Temer inherits a shrinking economy, a Zika virus outbreak that has ravaged poor northeastern states and political instability fed by a sprawling corruption probe that has tarred much of the country’s political and business elite – himself included.
