Dilma Rousseff, the suspended Brazilian president accused of manipulating the budget, has told Al Jazeera that she will fight the case against her to the end.

The impeachment process against Rousseff, who has been in office since 2011, has officialy started.
Brazil’s impeachment trial

“I believe that every impeachment must guarantee the right to defence,” Rousseff told Al Jazeera’s Latin America Editor Lucia Newman in an interview at the Presidential Residence, where she is allowed to remain during the impeachment process.

“We are going to present witnesses,” she said. “We want them to analyse every minute detail of the charges.

“In the final vote, we need 28 votes to win – we have 22, so it’s not something so impossible to achieve, winning six more votes.”

Rousseff does not personally face corruption charges, but is accused of breaking budget accounting rules during her 2014 re-election campaign.
Her opponents are eager to wrap up the trial by August 2, before Brazil hosts the Summer Olympics.

Rousseff’s new-found confidence may not be unwarranted. Two senators who supported her impeachment have said they are now reconsidering.

This follows revelations involving two of Interim President Michel Temer’s top ministers.

Both Fabiano Silveira, transparency chief, and Romero Juca, the planning minister, were forced to resign after recordings were leaked allegedly showing them conspiring to derail ongoing corruption investigations.

While the political drama unfolds, the latest quarterly GDP report confirms what ordinary Brasilians already know, that their economy is falling deeper into recession.

In the last quarter of 2015, the economy shrunk a massive 5.4 percent compared with the first quarter of last year.

While Rousseff blames her opponents for not letting her govern, many Brazilians say the corruption and instability of their entire political class is driving the world’s seventh largest economy into the ground.

[Source: Al-Jazeera]