Suspended Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff was scheduled to confront her accusers yesterday in a dramatic finale to a Brazilian Senate impeachment trial likely to end 13 years of left-wing rule in Latin America’s biggest country.
Rousseff’s testimony will come just hours before a final vote to decide her fate, with everything pointing to her being convicted.
Rousseff, 68, is accused of having taken illegal state loans to patch budget holes.
Photo: Reuters
Momentum to push her out is also fueled by deep anger at Brazil’s historic recession, political paralysis and a vast corruption scandal centered on state oil giant Petrobras.
Rousseff is to speak for about half an hour, then face questioning.
However, it was unclear whether Rousseff will repeat her explosive claim on the Senate floor that the trial is a coup aimed at destroying her Workers’ Party and restoring the right to power.
“She will go in high spirits. She is calm,” an aide told reporters.
Adding to the sense of a showdown, Rousseff is to be accompanied by heavyweight supporters, including her predecessor former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, famed singer Chico Buarque and a dozen former cabinet members.
However, there appears to be little Rousseff can say to save her presidency.
Closing arguments are scheduled to begin after her testimony today, followed by voting, possibly extending into tomorrow. Opponents said they will easily reach the needed two-thirds majority — 54 of 81 senators — to remove her from office.
In that case, Brazilian interim president Michel Temer would be confirmed as president until elections in 2018.
Criticized for lacking a popular touch or appetite for backroom politicking, Rousseff has barely double-digit approval ratings.
However, busloads of supporters were expected in the capital to protest against what Rousseff has repeatedly called a coup.
Activists told reporters they hoped to give her roses.
There is lingering sympathy for Rousseff, who was imprisoned and tortured by the country’s military dictatorship in the 1970s for belonging to a far left urban guerrilla cell.
Although her presidency has been mired in the Petrobras embezzlement and bribery scandal, she has never been charged with trying to enrich herself — unlike many of her prominent accusers and close allies.
Temer is hardly more popular, according to opinion polls. He faces harsh questioning over his legitimacy as an unelected president and was loudly booed at the Olympic opening ceremony in Rio de Janeiro.
The impeachment case rests on narrow charges that Rousseff took unauthorized state loans to bridge budget shortfalls during her 2014 election to a second term.
Allies have spent the Senate trial arguing that these loans were nothing more than stopgap measures frequently employed by previous governments.
However, opponents have broadened the accusation to paint Rousseff’s loans as part of her disastrous mismanagement, contributing to once booming Brazil’s slide into recession.
Brazil’s economy shrank 3.8 percent last year and is forecast to drop a further 3.3 percent this year, the worst performance since the 1930s.
Rousseff’s side says that decline was caused by forces beyond the president’s control, notably a worldwide slump in commodity prices, which hit exports hard.
“There is no basis to say that the president is criminally responsible,” former Brazilian minister of finance Nelson Barbosa said in one of the final pieces of defense testimony on the weekend.
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