Brazil's senate voted to remove Dilma Rousseff from office as president with 61 votes in favour and 20 against, but rejected the proposal to bar her from standing for election for eight years, meaning she will be able to run again at the next elections. An outcome anticipated by many, which brings to a close an impeachment process lasting nine months. Moreover, with the fall of Rousseff, 68, thirteen years of Workers' Party government come to an end. The impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, accused of having falsified the state budget to conceal the country's negative economic situation, had been declared in December 2015. Michel Temer, a conservative supporter of economic neoliberalism, has taken her place as the 37th president.

"This process is reminiscent of the years of the dictatorship"

The protests of Rousseff's supporters proved futile, as did the words spoken in the senate by Brazil's first female president: in her address she denied every charge and said that the impeachment process was aimed solely at protecting the interests of the country's economic elite: "I did not commit the crimes of which I am accused in an arbitrary and unjust manner. […] My conscience is clear regarding everything I did as president of the country."

Also in her Monday address, Rousseff compared the impeachment process to the persecution she suffered during the period of dictatorship in Brazil, when she was a representative of the left-wing urban guerrilla movement. Rousseff is the first president to be removed through impeachment since 1992, the year in which the same fate befell then-president Fernando Collor de Mello, who was accused of corruption.

After Rousseff

Michel Temer will now remain in office as president until December 2018, when new elections will be held. In the meantime, Temer has already announced new austerity measures "to pull Brazil out of its worst recession since 1930." Measures that have been met with a cool reception in congress, particularly those relating to the public spending cap and pension reform.

Temer thus becomes Brazil's 37th president. His inauguration, however, has not reassured parliament: the risk of impeachment hangs over him too, given that several analysts consider him equally responsible for the falsification of the budget — Temer was, after all, Rousseff's deputy at the time of the offence — in addition to being accused of corruption in the Petrobras scandal. According to some informants in the "Lava Jato" investigation (Brazil's equivalent of Mani Pulite), Temer is alleged to have benefited from bribes.