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Brazil’s Senate Votes to Put Dilma Rousseff on Trial
Brazil’s Senate Votes to Move Ahead with Dilma Rousseff’s Trial
(about 1 hour later)
BRASÍLIA — Brazil’s Senate voted early Wednesday to indict President Dilma Rousseff on charges of breaking budget laws and put her on trial in an impeachment process that has stalled Brazilian politics since January.
RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil’s Senate voted in the early hours of Wednesday to push forward with the impeachment trial of Dilma Rousseff, the president who was suspended in May, an important step that could result in her final removal from office.
With the eyes of the world on the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, and after a raucous, 20-hour session presided over by Chief Justice Ricardo Lewandowski, senators in the capital, Brasília, voted 59 to 21 in favor of sending the suspended leftist leader to trial.
The trial in the Senate, which will be overseen by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, is expected to take place this month. After hours of debate in the capital, Brasília, senators voted 59 to 21 to indict her on charges of budgetary manipulation, formally making her a defendant.
A conviction would definitively remove Ms. Rousseff from office, ending 13 years of government under her Workers’ Party, and would lead the way for Michel Temer, the interim president, to serve the rest of her term, which runs until 2018.
Although only a simple majority was needed in Wednesday’s vote, the number of senators that went against Ms. Rousseff exceeded the two-thirds that would be needed to oust her permanently when a final vote is held after the trial ends.
Ms. Rousseff’s opponents needed only a simple majority in the 81-seat Senate to send her to trial on charges of manipulating government accounts and spending without congressional approval, which they say helped her win re-election in 2014.
She also lost the crucial support of a senator from the governing Brazilian Democratic Movement Party who had previously voted against the impeachment process.
A verdict in the trial is expected at the end of the month. A conviction would require the votes of two-thirds of the Senate, five votes less than on Wednesday.
After an all-night debate in May, the Senate voted to temporarily remove Ms. Rousseff from office and to begin impeachment proceedings, sidelining a deeply unpopular leader whose sagging political fortunes came to embody widespread public anger over systemic corruption and a battered economy.
Wednesday’s vote showed that the movement to oust Ms. Rousseff has gained strength in the Senate, which voted 55 to 22 in May to take up the impeachment proceedings begun in the lower house in December.
On Wednesday, the Senate voted to formally indict Ms. Rousseff. She has been accused of manipulating the federal budget to conceal mounting economic problems.
The move is likely to strengthen Mr. Temer’s hand as he strives to establish his legitimacy and to stabilize Brazil politically.
The Senate’s move comes during the Summer Olympics, which are being held in Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s political upheaval resulted in some awkwardness in the first week of the Games. The interim president, Michel Temer, who took over in May after the Senate’s vote to suspend Ms. Rousseff, is highly unpopular and was booed by many fans when he attended the opening ceremony last week.
The uncertainty has hampered his efforts to address a fiscal crisis inherited from Ms. Rousseff, who is accused of driving the economy into what could be its worst recession since the 1930s.
Mr. Temer, Ms. Rousseff’s conservative former vice president, who took over as interim president in May, has urged senators to wrap up the trial quickly so that he can move ahead with a plan to cap public spending, overhaul the pension system and restore confidence in government finances.
Investor expectations that Ms. Rousseff would be replaced long-term by the more business-friendly Mr. Temer have strengthened the value of Brazil’s currency and have driven up shares on the São Paulo stock market by more than 30 percent since January, placing them among the world’s best-performing assets.
Ms. Rousseff has denied any wrongdoing and denounced the impeachment proceedings as a right-wing conspiracy that used an accounting provision as a pretext to illegally remove a government that improved the condition of Brazil’s low-income families
“The cards are marked in this game,” a Workers’ Party senator, Jorge Viana, said in a speech to the chamber. “There is no trial, just a sentence that has already been written.”
The impeachment, he added, was driven by an elite that opposes social-welfare gains.
Ms. Rousseff’s critics say that her interventionist economic policies and her inability to govern resulted in her current debacle. Some argue that, whatever the legal reasons for impeaching her, she should not be allowed to return to office.
Her supporters argue that she is being ousted by politicians who, in many cases, are themselves being investigated on accusations of having received kickbacks in a graft scandal at the state-led oil company Petrobras.
Corruption accusations forced the resignation of three of Mr. Temer’s cabinet members. In testimony on a plea bargain published by the local news media over the weekend, the jailed construction magnate Marcelo Odebrecht was said to have claimed that Mr. Temer received illegal campaign funding.
