Brazil’s Senate convened Wednesday for a closely watched vote that will determine whether President Dilma Rousseff gets kicked out of office.
In an impeachment process that’s dragged on for months, Rousseff was accused of breaking budgetary laws. She was suspended in May. And if senators find her guilty in an impeachment trial Wednesday, she’ll be removed from office.
Vice President Michel Temer, who’s been acting as interim president since Rousseff’s suspension, will assume the office of president and serve out the remainder of her term.
If the motion to remove her from office fails, the suspended Rousseff will resume her duties immediately.
Rousseff, 68, Brazil’s first-ever female head of state and a former Marxist guerrilla, insisted earlier this week that she had committed no crime and said she was proud that she’d been “faithful to my commitment to the nation.”
In May, Rousseff called the impeachment proceedings an attempt at a power grab by her rivals. She said her government has long been the target of political sabotage.
“When Brazil or when a president is impeached for a crime that they have not committed, the name we have for this in democracy — it’s not an impeachment, it is a coup,” she said after the Senate voted to launch the proceedings.
The heir-apparent to former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Rousseff was re-elected by a narrow margin in 2014, but a recession and a cross-party corruption scandal put an end to any political goodwill she might have earned, eventually leading to her ouster/the protracted battle.