BRASILIA: The Brazilian Senate was expected to suspend President Dilma Rousseff on Wednesday in a vote to put her on trial for breaking budget laws, pushing a deeply unpopular leader from power and ending 13 years of rule by her leftist Workers Party.
If her opponents garner a simple majority in the 81-seat Senate in a session that will last into the night, Rousseff will be replaced on Thursday by Vice President Michel Temer as acting president for up to six months during the trial.
In a sign that Rousseff was preparing for defeat, she plans to dismiss all her cabinet and has given instructions that there should be no easy transition for a Temer government because she considers her impeachment illegal, a presidential aide said.
The dismissals would include Central Bank Governor Alexandre Tombini. A spokesman for Temer said the incoming president had not planned to replace Tombini until after the bank's next interest rate setting meeting on June 8.
In a momentous session followed by many Brazilians live on television, each senator was to be given the chance to speak. The final vote was expected to take place at around 10 p.m. (0100 GMT on Thursday).
Brasilia-based consultancy ARKO Advice projected that the upper chamber would vote 57-21 to try Rousseff. The figure amounted to 78 votes rather than 81 due to absences and abstentions.
That would indicate that Rousseff's opponents may well muster the two-thirds of the vote needed to convict her at the end of the trial and remove her definitively from office. If that happened, Temer would then fulfill the remainder of her mandate until elections in 2018.
A Supreme Court judge denied an injunction sought on Tuesday by Rousseff in a last-ditch bid to halt the Senate vote. Justice Teori Zavascki rejected as "legally implausible" the government's argument that impeachment was flawed because it was started out of revenge by the former speaker of the lower house.
Senate leader Renan Calheiros, of Temer's Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), said he would not cast a vote because he wanted to retain neutrality. But he was already using the past tense when referring to Rousseff's presidency.
"Temer needs the backing of Congress to carry out deep reforms, above all reform of the political system, if he becomes president," he told reporters.
The prospect of business-friendly Temer taking power has driven Brazilian financial markets sharply higher this year, on hopes his team could cut a massive fiscal deficit and return the battered economy to growth.
Rousseff, who is Brazil's first woman leader and has been in office since 2011, has seen her popularity crushed by a long-running probe into a vast kickback scheme at state-run oil company Petrobras, at a time when she was chairwoman of the company, which has tainted her political allies.
Rousseff, 68, is not accused of personal corruption, but stands charged with manipulating government accounts to disguise the size of Brazil's fiscal deficit to allow her to boost public spending during her 2014 re-election campaign, a practice employed by previous presidents.
The political crisis has deepened Brazil's worst recession since the 1930s.
It comes less than two years after Rousseff was narrowly re-elected to a second four-year term and at a time when Brazil hoped to be shining on the world stage, as it prepares to host the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in August.
Opinion polls show an overwhelming majority of Brazilians want to see Rousseff impeached. But the surveys also indicate scant popular support for the 75-year-old Temer.
"I voted for Dilma, I believe in her as a leader, but I also think she has done such a bad job that it is time for her to go," said Leticia Britto, a 23-year-old business student from Sao Paulo, visiting Brasilia. "The best way forward would be to call for new elections."
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