Brazil's Dilma Rousseff Impeached by Senate in Crushing Defeat
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Brazil’s first female president Dilma Rousseff has been thrown out of office by the country’s corruption-tainted senate after a grueling impeachment trial that ends 13 years of Workers’ party rule.
Following a crushing 61 to 20 defeat in the upper house, she will be replaced for the remaining two years and four months of her term by Michel Temer, a center-right patrician who was among the leaders of the campaign against his former running mate.
In a separate vote, the senate voted 42 to 36 not to bar Rousseff from public office for eight years.
In his first address to the nation after being sworn in by Congress last night, Temer said it was time to unite the country, vowing to work to rescue an economy mired in recession and guarantee political stability for foreign investors.
Rousseff was defiant after being ousted. “They think they’ve defeated us, but they’re wrong,” she said from her official residency, her voice cracking and eyes moist with emotion. “I know we will all fight.”
Despite never losing an election, Rousseff – who first won power in 2010 – had seen her support among the public and in congress diminish as a result of a sharp economic decline, government paralysis and a massive bribery scandal that has implicated almost all the major parties.
For more than 10 months, the leftist leader fought efforts to impeach her for frontloading funds for government social programs and issuing spending budget decrees without congressional approval ahead of her reelection in 2014. The opposition claimed that these constituted a “crime of responsibility”.
Rousseff denies this and claims the charges – which were never levelled at previous administrations who did the same thing – have been trumped up by opponents who were unable to accept the Workers’ party’s victory.
Speaking to her supporters from the presidential palace after the vote, Rousseff pledged to appeal her impeachment, which she called a parliamentary coup. The ousted president also called on her supporters to fight the conservative agenda now bolstered by her removal from office.
“Right now, I will not say goodbye to you. I am certain I can say, ‘See you soon,’” she told supporters in Brasilia, the Guardian reported.
Her lawyer, José Eduardo Cardozo, said the charges were trumped up to punish the president’s support for a huge corruption investigation that has snared many of Brazil’s elite. This follows secret recordings of Romero Jucá, the majority leader of the senate and a key Temer ally, plotting to remove the president to halt the Lava Jato (car wash) investigation into kickbacks at state oil company Petrobras.
