A man carries a banner with the name of Brazil’s suspended President Dilma Rousseff at a camp in Brasilia, Brazil, Sunday, Aug. 28, 2016. In the next phase, she will answer questions asked by Senators.
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Mr Temer, who was Ms Rousseff’s vice-president, assumed the role of acting president in May when Ms Rousseff was suspended from office pending the impeachment trial.
She said the impeachment process had exacerbated the recession in Latin America’s largest economy, flipping the blame on the opposition, which often argues she has to be removed for the financial climate to improve.
“We are one step away from a real coup d’etat”, the former leftist guerrilla said.
“I have made mistakes, but I have not committed any crimes”. She repeatedly noted she had been elected by 54 million Brazilians, characterizing the impeachment as a challenge to the “solemn will of the people”.
This is the first time Rousseff has addressed Brazil’s Congress directly since proceedings started in late 2015.
But momentum to push her out of office is also fueled by deep anger at Brazil’s historic recession, political paralysis and a vast corruption scandal centered on state oil giant Petrobras.
She chaired the board of Petrobras from 2003 to 2010, when the worst of the corruption was taking place.
It said that the trial examined whether Rousseff was guilty of manipulating government accounts to obscure the country’s deteriorating budget situation during her 2014 re-election campaign. Her vice president, Michel Temer, has been interim president since mid-May, when Rousseff was suspended after Congress decided it would continue the impeachment process that began in the lower house.
Several hundred supporters were demonstrating outside Congress before Rousseff’s appearance.
His business-friendly government vows to take unpopular austerity measures to plug a growing fiscal deficit that cost Brazil its investment-grade credit rating past year.
About 200 people gathered outside the Senate building in Brasilia to lend their support to Ms Rousseff.
The decision to impeach Rousseff came after about 20 hours of debate in the Senate.
Rousseff has described the trial as an attempt at a coup – a characterization she brought up again in her speech on Monday, during which she denounced her accusers as corrupt and their allegations as unfounded and hypocritical.
“Curiously, I will be judged for crimes I did not commit before the trial of the former speaker who is accused of very serious illegal acts”, she said.
“We need 54 votes and we expect to get at least 60”, Temer’s press spokesman, Marcio de Freitas, told Reuters.
Rousseff said that Brazilians would never have voted for a man who picked a Cabinet of all white men in a country that is more than 50 percent non-white.
Rousseff is charged with financing government spending without congressional approval while a slowing economy eroded tax revenue, causing the budget deficit to more than treble over the past two years to around 10 percent of gross domestic product.
“While the impeachment has been widely anticipated, it’s impact has been positive for Brazilian assets”, said Georgette Boele, a strategist at ABN Amro Bank NV in Amsterdam.
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She described those working to impeach her as elites “trying to create a democratic rupture”, imploring senators to “vote against impeachment and vote for democracy”.
