President of Brazil Impreached

Anyone else been following the political situation in Brazil lately?

I've seen some headlines about it, but I admit that my knowledge of what is happening there is pretty shallow. I would like to learn more though. The latest development is that President Dilma Rousseff has been impeached:

Dilma Rousseff Is Impeached by Brazil’s Lower House of Congress (New York Times)

Quote:

BRASÍLIA — Brazilian legislators voted on Sunday night to approve impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, the nation’s first female president, whose tenure has been buffeted by a dizzying corruption scandal, a shrinking economy and spreading disillusionment. After three days of impassioned debate, the lower house of Congress, the Chamber of Deputies, voted to send the case against Ms. Rousseff to the Senate. Its 81 members will vote by a simple majority on whether to hold a trial on charges that the president illegally used money from state-owned banks to conceal a yawning budget deficit in an effort to bolster her re-election prospects. Those pressing for impeachment had to win the support of two-thirds of the 513 deputies in the lower house; the decisive 342nd vote for impeachment happened at about 10:10 p.m. Eastern time. At that time, there were 127 no votes, and six abstentions. If the Senate accepts the case, Ms. Rousseff will step down temporarily while it deliberates her fate. Vice President Michel Temer, a constitutional law scholar and seasoned politician, will assume the presidency. Given the larger-than-expected margin of deputies voting for impeachment, some political analysts said the Senate was likely to remove Ms. Rousseff from office, a ruling that would require a two-thirds majority. “Politicians know how to read society pretty well, and they can sense that the people want her out,” said Paulo Sotero, the director of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

I also heard that Ms. Rousseff accused the Vice President of a conspiracy against her, so that he could assume the presidency. Some of her supporters see this as a coup.

Quote:

“This is a coup, a traumatic injury to Brazil’s presidential system,” said Pedro Arruda, a political analyst at the Pontifical Catholic University in São Paulo. “This is just pretext to take down a president who was elected by 54 million people. She doesn’t have foreign bank accounts, and she hasn’t been accused of corruption, unlike those who are trying to impeach her.”

Some background:

Quote:

The vote to impeach is a crushing defeat for Ms. Rousseff and her Workers’ Party, a former band of leftist agitators who battled the nation’s military rulers in the 1980s and who swept to power in 2002 with the election of one its founders, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to the presidency. Mr. Da Silva, a skillful politician who endeared himself to both rich and poor, presided over heady economic growth and a generous expansion of social welfare benefits that helped lift millions of Brazilians out of abject poverty. He also moved to strengthen the government’s control of key industries like petroleum. That set the stage for abuses at Petrobras, the state-owned oil company, that would later ensnare scores of the nation’s political and business elite in a scheme that funneled kickbacks into campaign coffers. Barred from running for a third term, he anointed Ms. Rouseff as his successor, and she easily won election in 2010. A former Marxist guerilla, Ms. Rousseff had never before held elected office, and critics say her lack of political skills hampered her ability to work with opposition members in Congress as well as key figures in her governing coalition. In 2014, she was re-elected by a thin margin after an especially divisive campaign. As the economy went into a tailspin and a huge corruption scandal took down once-untouchable political figures, Ms. Rousseff was abandoned by many of her allies, giving momentum to an impeachment initiative conceived by her rivals. . . . The impeachment drive has been deeply polarizing, spurring raucous street protests, sundering friendships and provoking widespread anxiety over the potential impact to Brazil’s democracy. Ms. Rousseff and her supporters have likened the impeachment drive to a slow-rolling coup by her political rivals, among them Mr. Temer, her vice president, who last month joined those calling for her impeachment. The recent fortunes of Brazil, once an economic powerhouse of the developing world, have gone from bad to worse, with the economy expected to contract at least 3.5 percent for a second year in a row. Millions of Brazilians have lost their jobs since the days of double-digit growth, fueled in part by China’s hunger for commodities. In recent months, her once-favorable approval ratings have dipped below 8 percent.

Brazil's economy is in bad shape right now, there have been lots of corruption scandals at the same time, and her government is extremely unpopular right now. There are also possible corruption scandals involving the Vice President, and the leader of the Lower House:

Quote:

Next in line for the presidency after Mr. Temer is Eduardo Cunha, the powerful leader of the lower house, who has been a driving force behind Ms. Rousseff’s impeachment. An evangelical Christian who is fond of using his Twitter account to spread biblical verse, Mr. Cunha is accused of using a Swiss bank account to conceal $40 million in bribes.

It seems like the political class is corrupt through-and-through.
There's actually a lot more in the article I would like to quote but I don't want to bend the forum rules too far.

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