Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff delivers a speech in Brasilia, Brazil, on Wednesday.
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(AP Photo/Eraldo Peres). A sign says in Portuguese “I trust Lula, Mato Grosso do Sul in the Fight” by a tent of government supporters in Brasilia, Brazil, Thursday, April 14, 2016.
The court must still rule on a request by Rousseff’s government to suspend Sunday’s vote.
The National Agricultural Confederation (CNA) is organizing a tractor “invasion” of the capital Brasilia on Sunday to pressure congressman to vote for impeachment.
Debates in the lower house about the impeachment process will begin on Friday morning and run all weekend before the vote on Sunday.
The pro-impeachment camp needs the support of two-thirds of the lower house of parliament – or 342 of the 513 votes – to send the proceedings to the Senate.
Several of the parties in Rousseff’s coalition have chose to break ties with her leftist Workers’ Party in recent weeks, including the PMDB of her vice president, Michel Temer.
The panel’s session stretched out all day and was marked by a prolonged shouting match ahead of the evening vote. PMDB quit the coalition on March 29. It has 66 deputies in the lower house. “Not all of them have definitively thrown in the towel, but the consensus is that the government is going through its worst moment”. He said discussion included the overall political crisis, the recession and a sprawling corruption probe at state oil company Petrobras.
Brazil’s top court met Thursday night in an extraordinary session to consider a motion by President Dilma Rousseff to block an upcoming impeachment vote against her, a process that the top legal official in her government blasted as “contaminated”.
The brokerage also said an ousting of Rousseff would boost the current trend of corn imports, since foreign shipments would become cheaper for Brazilian pork and poultry producers that are suffering from tight local supplies of corn.
Rousseff has denied allegations against her as politically motivated, vowing not to back down.
The newspaper O Globo in Rio de Janeiro said that under that system, the first deputy to vote would be Afonso Hamm, a Progressive Party legislator from the southern Rio Grande do Sul state.
The judges held an emergency session discussing the request on Thursday.
Reports said the embattled Rousseff was still struggling to collect enough support to defeat the impeachment. They say the government used sleight of hand accounting in a bid to shore up public support. She did not mention Temer by name but cited the message as evidence of what she called an attempted “coup”.
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Controversial lower house Speaker Eduardo Cunha opened the impeachment saga by accepting a petition from a group of lawyers last December.
