Brazil’s Supreme Court on Friday declined to give a lifeline to embattled President Dilma Rousseff, by rejecting a last-ditch attempt to halt the impeachment process against her.
Justices refused a request for an injunction against proceedings that the government lawyer called “Kafkaesque” and said amounted to denying Rousseff the opportunity to defend herself.
The ruling in an emergency Supreme Court session that began late Thursday and went well past midnight in the capital Brasilia paved the way for Sunday’s vote by the lower house of Congress, which is due to decide whether to send Rousseff to an impeachment trial.
Latest counts of voting intentions in the lower house by major Brazilian newspapers show the pro-impeachment camp either at, or on the verge of, the necessary two-thirds majority.
If the vote passes on Sunday, the Senate will have authority to open a trial against Rousseff, who is accused of illegal government accounting tricks to boost her re-election chances. If the Senate finds her guilty with another two-thirds vote, she would be forced from office.
The 68-year-old leftist leader’s grip on power is fast slipping, leaving Latin America’s biggest country in crisis at a time of major recession and less than four months before Rio de Janeiro hosts the Olympics.
Rousseff has been desperately trying to assemble enough support in the lower house to prevent the opposition amassing the 342 out of a total 513 votes they need to move the impeachment forward.
On Thursday, she launched a new line of defense, sending her government’s top lawyer, Jose Eduardo Cardozo, to file for the injunction. The government alleged procedural failings in the impeachment case, saying it had violated her right to a defense.
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