Dilma Rousseff Impeachment: Brazilian Legislators Vote To Send Case Against President To Senate

Just a few days ago, Brazil President Dilma Rousseff had been battling impeachment over allegations that she manipulated budgets to overspend in her 2014 re-election campaign. Now, Brazilian legislators have voted to send the case against her to the Senate, which means that 81 members will vote by a simple majority on whether to hold a trial investigating charges that she illegally used money from state-owned banks.

In case the Senate accepts, Rousseff would have to step down temporarily (or indefinitely) until her fate is decided. In the meantime, Vice President Michel Temer, will assume the presidency.

Pedro Arruda, a political analyst at the Pontifical Catholic University in São Paulo described the vote as a “traumatic injury to Brazil’s presidential system” as The New York Times reported. “This is just pretext to take down a president who was elected by 54 million people. She doesn’t have foreign bank accounts, and she hasn’t been accused of corruption, unlike those who are trying to impeach her.”

At the time, impeachment request alleged that Rousseff’s government violated campaign laws before and after last year’s election. However, it did not name Rousseff as a conspirator in the Lava Jato, a graft scandal that has plagued Brazilian politics for the past year, plunging the country into a political crisis outmatched only by its economic one.

Rousseff rejected both the allegations against her and the impeachment proposal. “My present and my past vouch for my honesty and my unquestionable commitment to the law,” Ms. Rousseff said in a televised address (WSJ translation). “We can’t permit indefensible interests to unsettle our country’s democracy.”

Professions of innocence like Rousseff’s have become ubiquitous in the upper-echelons of Brazilian politics, but the scandal-plagued President does have one thing going for her: zero evidence has been presented that directly implicates her in wrongdoing, or suggests that she personally benefited from bribes.