Brazil president's impeachment - Financial Times

Brazil’s congress voted on Sunday evening to impeach President Dilma Rousseff, ushering in a new period of heightened political uncertainty in Latin America’s biggest country.
Pro-impeachment politicians erupted into cheers and patriotic songs when the vote tally reached 342 in favour of the motion — the two-thirds of the 513-seat lower house needed to approve the motion, compared with 126 against. The final result had yet to be counted.
The decision threatens to bring an abrupt end to 13 years of Ms Rousseff`s socialist Workers’ party, or PT, rule and allow her vice-president Michel Temer to form a new government.


The baton now passes to the senate, which analysts expect to open the formal impeachment process, essentially a political trial, in the first half of next month.
“Dilma has ruined our country,” said Ilmo Buzo, a fireman in São Paulo carrying a 3m-wide flag, who joined the hundreds of thousands of people who turned out to protest for and against impeachment across Brazil.
“Many people out here today even voted for the PT once … we believed in them but they tricked us,” he said. “They promised to fight corruption but power corrupted them!”
Markets are expected to applaud the decision when they open tomorrow amid investor optimism that any new government led by Mr Temer’s centrist PMDB will better manage the economy than Ms Rousseff`s PT.
Dogged by a corruption scandal in Petrobras, the state-owned oil company, Ms Rousseff has presided over what is expected to be the country’s worst recession in more than a century, with the International Monetary Fund predicting a 3.8 per cent economic contraction in Brazil this year after a similar decline last year.
“We don’t have the right to deliver a country to our children that is worst than what we received from our parents,” said Jovair Arantes, a lawmaker from the minority PTB party who authored a special congressional report recommending impeachment.
Mr Temer has promised to adopt more orthodox economic principles, including a balanced budget and removing structural impediments to Brazil’s long-term fiscal health, such as the indexation of salaries, benefits and other payments to inflation.
But the decision by congress to pass the impeachment process after a marathon three-day session of speeches and behind-the-scenes politicking also threatens to increase political risk in Brazil.
The lower house of congress must now pass the impeachment process to the senate, which is expected by this Friday to install a special commission on the impeachment process.
The commission will have 10 days to submit its own report on the proposal, which will then be put to a vote in the senate on about May 11. If the senate votes by a simple majority of its 81 members to accept the motion, the formal impeachment trial will begin.

Brazil's Rousseff faces impeachment
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Ms Rousseff will be suspended for up to six months and Mr Temer will take over as acting president.
If two-thirds of the senate’s 81 members vote to impeach her in a session expected by the opposition to be held in late June, Mr Temer will lead the country until the next elections in 2018.
During the coming month, however, Ms Rousseff will still be president and will be able to use her office to try to persuade the senate to reject the impeachment motion by offering jobs and other financial incentives, opposition politicians fear.
Mr Temer, meanwhile, could face further strikes and protests by the PT’s militant support base in trade unions and social movements.
The Petrobras investigation will also continue, with major construction companies involved in the scandal believed to be negotiating new plea bargains that could implicate further members of Mr Temer’s PMDB party who are already accused of corruption.