In December of 2015, an impeachment request was accepted by the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Eduardo Cunha, also known as Rousseff’s “political nemesis.”
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Brazil’s suspended President Dilma Rousseff arrives at a rally in Brasilia, Brazil, Wednesday, Aug. 24, 2016.
Rousseff told hundreds of supporters who rallied on her behalf Wednesday night that she would personally defend herself in the Senate on Monday.
In Brazil, the Senate there has begun hearing witnesses in the impeachment trial of suspended President Dilma Rousseff.
According to a poll published by the Brazilian daily, O Globo, 51 senators were committed to voting to dismiss Rousseff while only 19 members were supporting her.
The upper house of the Brazilian parliament opened an impeachment trial of Rousseff on Thursday.
If she is acquitted, she will recover her mandate, which still has two years and four months remaining. The Associated Press explains how we got to this point and how the trial is likely to play out.
“Rousseff was re-elected in 2014”.
Rousseff’s rivals blame her for economic chaos and are out to crush her Workers’ Party (PT). Her foes in Congress introduced a measure past year to impeach and remove her.
Rousseff was suspended in May, and her vice president, Michel Temer, stepped in as interim president.
Thursday’s session, presided over by Supreme Court Chief Justice Ricardo Lewandowski, heard witnesses for and against Rousseff, Brazil’s first female president, who is charged with breaking budget laws. Congress has been slow in recent weeks to approve Temer’s measures to shrink the deficit, at times lacking quorum to vote on proposals to contain spending and boost revenue. “At no point has the defense used any techniques to procrastinate”.
Despite her defiance, Rousseff cuts a lonely figure, abandoned by even former government ministers and with only minimal public support. A supermajority – 54 of the 81 senators – is needed to convict her, which would result in her permanent removal from office.
Rousseff has denied any wrongdoing and claims her opponents carried out a “coup” to remove her from power and weaken her Workers’ Party, which had controlled the presidency for 13 years.
“Her mentor, former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, is also facing legal troubles”. If she is impeached, Temer would finish out the term, which ends in 2018.
In the unlikely case that she is acquitted, Rousseff would immediately return to office. But previous appeals during the process have failed. In a procedural vote on August 10 that would have ended the process had it gone in favor of Mr. Rousseff, 59 senators voted to approve a report calling for her removal and 21 voted against it.
Rousseff and her backers say impeachment is a “coup” by corrupt opposition lawmakers meant to derail investigations into into billions of dollars in kickbacks at the state oil company.
But fixing Brazil’s recession-battered economy will prove no easy task, especially as rifts in Temer’s alliance threaten to intensify once the common goal of ousting Rousseff is gone.
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If Rousseff is removed, Temer must be sworn in by the Senate.
