Development: On 9 August Brazil’s federal senate voted to indict the suspended president, Dilma Rousseff on charges of fiscal malfeasance, paving the way for Rousseff to be subjected to an impeachment trial.
Significance: The result of the vote was expected, and Rousseff’s impeachment appears all but a formality now, with the senate expected to hold a final vote on whether she is impeached by the end of the month.
- Following a noisy 20-hour session overseen by the president of the supreme court (STF), Ricardo Lewandowski, the 81-member senate voted 59-21 to indict Rousseff on charges that she breached fiscal rules by borrowing from state banks to cover federal government budget gaps without informing congress, thereby allowing for additional spending ahead of the October 2015 general elections (in which Rousseff was re-elected for a second term and the leftist Partido dos Trabalhadores [PT] for a fourth consecutive term in government). An earlier report by the senate’s impeachment committee had also declared Rousseff a “dishonest administrator”, implying that she knowingly broke the fiscal rules.
- Rousseff continues to deny the charges and dismisses the whole impeachment process as a farce. The PT refers to it as a “coup d’état”. The PT secured external support for its position yesterday from the US senator for Vermont and recent presidential contender for the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders. He issued a statement declaring the effort to remove Rousseff was “not a legal trial but rather a political one”, and he called on the US not to “sit by silently while the democratic institutions of one of our most important allies are undermined”.
- While Rousseff still has vocal supporters, some of whom have sought to make their voices heard at the Olympic Games currently being held in Rio de Janeiro, others in Brazil are taking a pragmatic view and want to move forward after nine months of unprecedented political and economic upheaval. The senate vote reflected that point of view, with more senators voting against Rousseff than in May, when the upper house voted 55-22 in favour of advancing with her impeachment process after it was initiated by the federal chamber of deputies in December 2015, just weeks after Rousseff’s re-election.
Looking Ahead: A date for the final trial in the senate, expected to last a week, has yet to be set, but it could begin on 26 August. Two-thirds of the senate must vote to remove the president at the end of this trial in order to definitely remove her, upon which her interim replacement, Michel Temer, of the Partido Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (PMDB), Brazil’s largest political party, would be confirmed in his post until the next scheduled election, due in October 2018.
