Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff has been removed from presidential office after senators in Brasilia voted to impeach her.
After a year-long struggle between President’s party and the opposition senators voted 61-20 to remove the President. The vice president, Michel Temer, 75, who has been serving as interim President of South America’s largest economy since May, was sworn in as Brazil’s new leader yesterday (31st).
Ms. Rousseff speaking to her supporters outside the presidential palace said she was the victim of a coup and thee had been 14 attempts to oust her by fraudsters and the corrupt. She said, “They think that they beat us, but they are wrong.”
She said she would form “the strongest, most tireless and most active opposition that a coup government could suffer.” Ms. Rousseff said her ouster was an attack on “social movements and unions and against those who fight for their rights.”
The ousting of Ms Rousseff also marks the final extinguishing of 13 years of government control by her own Workers Party in Brazil, which under the stewardship first of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or simply Lula, who took power in 2003, and then herself reinforced a social safety net and helped to lift millions of Brazil’s poorest into the middle classes.
Ms. Rousseff was voted for re-election in 2014 by 54 million Brazilians. In her tweet she had earlier stated “today is the day that 61 men, many of them charged and corrupt, threw 54 million Brazilian votes in the garbage.”
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