Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff has been removed from power after 61 senators voted in favour of impeaching her against 20 who were against it.
Two thirds, or 54 of the 81 senators, had been required to finalise the president’s termination of office.
Michel Temer was sworn in as the new president for the remaining two years and four months of Rousseff’s term. He has said he will not stand in the next presidential election in 2018.
The impeachment trial effectively ends not only the presidency of the first woman to hold the post in Brazil but also 13 years of Workers’ Party government.
She was accused of having acted illegally ahead of her re-election in 2014 of allowing too much government money to be allocated in advance to social programmes and issuing spending budget decrees with no approval from congress.
The opposition claimed that these constituted a “crime of responsibility”.
Rousseff refuted this and said previous administrations had done the same without punishment and that the charges were trumped up by her political opponents.
Public and congressional support for her had waned because of the country’s steep economic decline which has cost thousands of jobs and an on-going massive bribery scandal which has rocked Brazil and implicated many of its leaders, including some of the senators who were voting to impeach the president.
Her lawyer said the charges were designed to retaliate for Rousseff’s support of the investigation into the scandal, widely dubbed Lava Jato (car wash), where the question of alleged kickbacks at the state’s oil company Petrobras are being considered in a long-running court case.
The final impeachment session took 16 hours of speeches from which Rousseff was absent. She told supporters that she would appeal the impeachment.
Rousseff had enjoyed approval ratings of 85% before the economy soured in early 2011 just as she took office. Quarterly growth rates of 5% became history, partly due to the impact of lower oil prices on the country’s oil exports.
It remains widely acknowledged that she continued the previous administration’s programmes of assistance to the poor which have raised millions out of poverty and seen an large increase in higher education enrolments.
Temer, who quickly received support from the United States, has promised to introduce austerity measures to recapture better credit ratings up from junk level. His own approval ratings are only marginally higher than Rousseff’s were at the end of her tenure and he was booed by the crowd at the Olympics opening ceremony.
In the 30 years since the military dictatorship ended, only two of the last eight directly-elected presidents have completed their terms. Two have been impeached, one removed by a military coup, one committed suicide, another died before taking power and another resigned.
