BRASILIA, (Reuters) – Brazil’s ousted President Dilma Rousseff appealed to the Supreme Court yesterday to overturn the Senate’s decision to remove her from office for breaking budgetary rules.
The Senate voted 61-20 on Wednesday to dismiss the leftist leader, confirming her conservative Vice President Michel Temer as president for the remainder of her term through 2018.
Rousseff’s lawyer, Jose Eduardo Cardozo, sought the injunction on grounds that lawyers for her accusers had made changes to their case that violated the right to due process, after they argued the president should also be judged for an economic crisis and sprawling corruption scandal in Brazil.
In the unlikely event the Supreme Court approved an injunction, Temer would return to being interim president while the Senate trial was repeated. Cardozo also asked the court to change the 1950 budget law on which her opponents based their charges that Rousseff had manipulated government accounts by using money from state banks to boost public spending during her 2014 re-election campaign.
So far, all requests made by Rousseff’s defense on the merits of the impeachment process against her have been rejected by the Supreme Court, whose Chief Justice Ricardo Lewandowski presided over her impeachment trial.
“This is a predictable request, but its chances of being successful are very, very remote,” said Thiago de Aragao, a political analyst and partner at Brasilia-based consultancy Arko Advice.
Millions took to the streets this year to demand Rousseff’s removal, less than two years after she was re-elected, as Brazil slid into its deepest recession in decades and a graft scandal at state oil company Petrobras tarnished her coalition.
Rousseff’s opponents hailed her removal as clearing the way for a change of fortunes in Brazil, but Temer inherits a bitterly divided nation with voters in no mood for the austerity measures he has promised to heal public finances.
