Speaking from the Presidential Palace after the final decision, Rousseff reiterated her innocence in the face of what she said were baseless charges. She consistently called the impeachment a coup d’état and denounced Temer as a “usurper”.
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Demonstrators rallied against Brazil’s President Michel Temer in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro on Sunday with signs reading “Temer Out” and “Election Now”.
Brazil’s de facto president Michel Temer was sworn in on August 31, after the country’s Senate voted to impeach suspended President Dilma Rousseff.
Tensions reached the streets as well, in particular in Sao Paulo, where violent demonstrations in favour of Rousseff broke out alongside the toasts to Temer.
For Ms Rousseff the experience was not as physically painful as the torture and abuse she suffered as a prisoner under the former dictatorship, but she felt just as keenly a sense of injustice and abuse of power.
Numerous lawmakers who voted to remove Rousseff are under investigation themselves in the scandal involving billions of dollars of kickbacks.
Major parties in Brazil’s governing coalition pressed the Supreme Court on Friday to overturn a Senate decision allowing former President Dilma Rousseff to remain politically active after her dismissal in an impeachment trial this week. She also told foreign media on Friday that she would raise her voice if Temer suppressed protests.
Two days later, she was indeed impeached. Those senators deny any wrongdoing. The Senate approved by a qualified majority the end to Rousseff’s mandate, but it did not get the necessary support to deprive her from holding a public post for an eight-year period.
“I don’t have political plans for office, but I do have political plans”. Her departure was nevertheless probably the best available outcome for a country reeling from political scandal and the worst recession in a century. Temer has been acting president since Rousseff was ousted in May; he will serve out her term until December 2017.
Whatever Americans may have thought of Rousseff, including her cancellation of a visit to the U.S.in 2013 based on revelations of spying on her and other Brazilian leaders, she was elected by voters twice, in basically fair and honest democratic elections.
Mr Temer said the protests were “little groups, not popular movements of any size”.
In the days leading up to her ousting, and afterwards, a handful of small anti-Temer demonstrations were broken up by police.
It is doubtless correct, as Rousseff’s defenders argue, that her fiscal violations were not the main cause of her removal.
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So far, all requests made by Rousseff’s defense on the merits of the impeachment process against her have been rejected by the high court, whose chief justice, Ricardo Lewandowski, presided over her impeachment trial.
