The impeachment process against Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff got back on track Monday after descending into confusion with leaders of the Senate and lower house of Congress arguing over whether it should continue.
Rousseff faces being suspended from office if the Senate votes — as now appears likely — to open an impeachment trial at a session starting Wednesday.
But earlier, in a stunning twist of events, the interim lower house speaker, Waldir Maranhao, declared that the whole process was flawed and should be brought back to square one.
Maranhao said the original vote by lower house deputies sending Rousseff to face the Senate had “prejudged” the president and denied her “the right to a full defense.” He called for the Senate to halt proceedings and for the lower house to hold a new vote.
The order sparked consternation in the capital, with Rousseff’s allies seeing a possible escape route for the president and her opponents reacting furiously.
Rousseff huddled in an emergency meeting with ministers and all eyes turned to see how the Senate would react.
Senate President Renan Calheiros did not take long.
“I ignore” the order, Calheiros said in a nationally televised session, sparking raucous applause and angry shouting from rival senators on the Senate floor.
Calheiros called Maranhao’s intervention in the impeachment drama “absolutely untimely” and “playing with democracy.”
Maranhao shot back shortly after in a brief press conference where he said he’d been trying to “save democracy” and “correct faults.”
It was not immediately clear whether the government would appeal to the Supreme Court to rule on the split between the lower and upper houses. However, the Senate picked up where it had left off and continued procedural preparations for the start of voting on Wednesday.
– ‘Surreal’ twist –
The impeachment battle has taken so many unexpected twists that Brazilians refer to it as a real-life version of the Netflix political drama “House of Cards.”
Rousseff, from the leftist Workers’ Party, is accused of illegally manipulating government budget accounts during her 2014 re-election battle to mask the seriousness of economic problems. But she says the process has been twisted into a coup by right-wingers in the second year of her second term