Brazil’s lower house of Congress votes to impeach Dilma Rousseff
President Dilma Rousseff lost a crucial impeachment vote in Brazil’s lower house on Sunday evening, making her removal ever more likely and deepening the country’s political crisis less than four months before the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
Rousseff’s opponents easily obtained the two-thirds majority of votes in the 513-member Chamber of Deputies needed to pass the impeachment measure. Voting one by one in a rollicking marathon session broadcast live on television to a rapt Brazilian public, the pro-impeachment lawmakers celebrated wildly on the floor of parliament as they vaulted past the minimum threshold needed to repudiate her.
“To rescue the hope that was stolen from the Brazilian people, I vote yes,” said Shéridan de Anchieta, one of the many anti-Rousseff lawmakers whose statements brought rowdy applause and jeers to the chamber. One lawmaker fired confetti into the air from a toy pistol after voting to sack the president.
The cascade of votes to boot Rousseff from office less than two years after her reelection was a powerful display of her abject political collapse and the extremes of her unpopularity. Rousseff, 68, is the hand-picked successor of iconic former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and their leftist Workers’ Party once seemed unassailable as it led Brazil through an extended period of prosperity that lifted tens of millions out of poverty.
She and her supporters repeatedly denounced the impeachment attempt as “a coup” tantamount to an interruption of Brazilian democracy, which was restored in 1985 after 21 years of military rule.
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