Brazil’s Senate has voted in favour of
permanently removing President Dilma
Rousseff from her office, in an impeachment
trial set to end 13 years of leftist rule in the
country, Al Jazeera reports.
Sixty-one of 81 senators voted against
Rousseff on Wednesday after a five-day trial
and a lengthy overnight debate.
“Today is the day that 61 men, many of them
charged and corrupt, threw 54 million
Brazilian votes in the garbage,” Rousseff
tweeted minutes after the decision.
In a separate vote senators decided not to ban
Rousseff from seeking a public office for the
next eight years.
Al Jazeera reported that Rousseff was
watching the session from the presidential
palace and would speak a couple of hours
after the vote at a news conference.
She also said that the case was not expected
to go any further as the charges were
political, not criminal.
Allies of Rousseff have signalled that they
would take the case to the Supreme Court. But
several motions filed to the country’s highest
court throughout the impeachment
proceedings have failed.
Rousseff’s former vice-president turned rival
Michel Temer, 75, was sworn in as president
on Wednesday until the next scheduled
election in late 2018.
Rousseff, from the leftist Workers’ Party, is
accused of taking illegal state loans to patch
budget holes in 2014, masking the country’s
problems as it slid into its deepest recession
in decades.
She told the Senate that she was innocent,
saying the impeachment trial amounted to a
right-wing coup d’etat.
Rousseff asserted that impeachment was the
price she paid for refusing to quash a wide-
ranging police investigation into the state oil
company Petrobras, saying that corrupt
politicians conspired to oust her to derail the
investigation into billions in kickbacks at the
oil giant.
She said it was “an irony of history” that she
would be judged for crimes she did not
commit, by people accused of serious crimes.
The Workers’ Party under Rousseff and her
predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is
credited with raising around 29 million
Brazilians out of poverty.
But many now blame the party and Rousseff
in particular for the country’s multiple ills.
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