Brazil. The Senate, with a vote of 61 in favor and 20 against, finalized the removal of the former Brazilian president after the impeachment proceedings began: Michel Temer is the new president of Brazil. Rousseff has been in trouble since at least 2014, when her party—the center-left Workers’ Party, which has governed since 2003—was heavily implicated in the Petrobras corruption case. Rousseff has never been personally investigated, but many have accused her, among other things, of not doing enough to combat corruption within her party and government and of implementing economic policies that led Brazil into recession. In October 2015, the Tribunal de Contas da União (TCU), the equivalent of the Italian Court of Auditors, declared that the 2014 state budget presented by Rousseff’s government had been “rigged” to conceal the country’s truly dire economic situation, thereby influencing the presidential campaign in which Rousseff was subsequently re-elected. It was the first time since 1937 that the state budget had been rejected. The impeachment proceedings began in December 2015 and continued despite Rousseff’s several appeals to the Brazilian Supreme Court.
