#Brazil : Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff says she is the victim of a coup mounted by her vice president, Michel Temer, who will take power if she is suspended
Rousseff’s solicitor general went to the court in the capital Brasilia barely 12 hours before the Senate was due to begin its session.
However, a spokesman for the court told AFP that it was not known when the justice assigned to the case would issue an initial ruling.
The Senate was due to start debating at approximately 9:00 am (1200 GMT) in the futuristic Congress building, with voting not expected to take place possibly until the early hours of Thursday.
Protesters demonstrate against Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff in Brasilia
Rousseff is accused of breaking budgetary laws. A majority of more than half of the 79 senators able to vote would trigger her automatic suspension for six months and the opening of a trial that could take several months.
Temer, whose center-right PMDB party broke off its uneasy partnership with leftist Rousseff’s Workers’ Party, has already prepared a new government and says his priority will be to take action on the moribund Brazilian economy, now in its worst recession for decades.
Rousseff, a one-time Marxist guerrilla who was imprisoned and tortured under Brazil’s military rulers in the 1970s, vows to resist.
“I am going to fight with all my strength, using all means available,” she told a women’s forum in Brasilia on Tuesday in what could have been one of her last official events as president.
Key players in Brazil’s political crisis
Rousseff called her opponents “people (who) can’t win the presidency through a popular vote” and claimed they had a “project to dismantle” social gains made by millions of poor during 13 years of Workers’ Party rule.
However, Rousseff is deeply unpopular with most Brazilians, who blame her for presiding over the recession and a massive corruption scandal centered on state-oil company Petrobras.
– Tensions – according to AFP reports,
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