The Senate admitted the beginning of the impeachment trial against President Dilma Rousseff, with 55 votes in favor and 22 against. Beginning today, Dilma Rousseff will leave her seat for 180 days. Temer will be inaugurated as President of Brazil without people’s support. A recent poll found out that only 2 percent of Brazilians would vote for Michel Temer for President.

Last night, while the Senate consummated the coup, thousands of people gathered throughout Brazil to protest. An inferior number gathered to applaud the destitution of the President. In Brasilia, the police brutally repressed a demonstration of women that expressed their support to the first female President of Brazil. This might be a taste of what will come with Temer in the government.

The voting began yesterday (Wednesday 11) and ended today, in the early hours of the morning, after 20 hours of debate.

“The impeachment against President Dilma Rousseff is unthinkable and would create an institutional crisis. It has no political nor juridical basis”. These words were pronounced less than a year ago by the man who now leads the impeachment process and the institutional coup against Dilma Rousseff: Michel Temer, a man that is under investigation for being a part of an illegal operation that sold ethanol in the black market, accused of leading corruption in the Santos City harbor and was sentenced for irregularities in the expenditures of electoral campaigns. He’s the new interim President of Brazil, until the trial against Dilma Rousseff is over.

Temer has no doubt that Rousseff won’t return to her seat and he’s confident that he will govern the country until December 31, 2018. Although there isn’t enough evidence to find Rousseff guilty of “crimes of responsibility” —the alleged reason is that she had broken a fiscal norm, as every Brazilian President did before her—, the process of impeachment has moved forward regardless up to this point. That’s why Temer spent the last few weeks outlining his government plan, and has also concerned himself with gathering enough support from the Congress, especially in the convoluted Deputy Chamber.

A few days ago, Temer’s plans suffered a hard blow with the suspension of his main ally, Eduardo Cunha, who despite several accusations against him, presided the Chamber of Deputies. Cunha, one of the most corrupt among the many corrupt deputies, was a key element of Temer’s government, as he was to gather the support of the deputies in exchange for seats and money allocations.

Temer rises to government hand in hand with those that had been defeated in the last four presidential elections: the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), of former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who made his greatest effort to promote the institutional coup. And also the far right, incarnated by the Democrat Party (DEM).

The new government will include some questionable names. The most important seat, the Ministry of Finance, will be occupied by Henrique Meirelles, a neoliberal. Temer also tried to name a preacher, who is also an ardent creationist and detractor of the theories of Charles Darwin, as the head of the Science and Technology Ministry.

He will rule in the shadow of Aécio Neves, who in 2014, 4 days after his defeat, ask the Justice to revoke Dilma’s mandate. Now, Neves has achieved that, but through the Congress.

Today, Dilma will return to the Palace of Planalto for a press round at 10 a.m. It will be her last act as President, a mandate that she earned with 54 and a half million votes and that was ended by senators.

- Eric Nepomuceno /

Source www.jornada.unam.mx / The Dawn News / May 12, 2016.