Temer, whose center-right PMDB party broke off its uneasy partnership with Rousseff’s party, has already prepared a new government. He said his priority will be to rescue the economy, now in its worst recession for decades.
Rousseff vowed 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.
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.
In an effort to cripple Temer’s ambitions, Rousseff allies also went to the top electoral court asking that the probable acting president be barred from appointing his own ministers.
However, analysts say Rousseff’s fightback probably comes too late and that she had already burned many of her political bridges before the crisis erupted with an awkward style and inability to negotiate.
The country’s first female president has also become deeply unpopular with most Brazilians, who blame her for presiding over the recession and a massive corruption scandal centered on the state oil company Petrobras.
– Street tensions –
Workers’ Party faithful on Tuesday burned tires and blocked roads in Brasilia and in Sao Paulo in a potential taste of more street trouble to come.
Lawmaker Jose Guimaraes, a Rousseff ally, said that despite almost certain defeat in the initial Senate vote, the impeachment trial itself would be an all-out fight as his side fought to win over Senators.
Police responded to heightened tension by building a huge metal barricade outside Congress in Brasilia to separate rival groups of protesters during the Senate vote. A separation corridor 80 meters (yards) wide and more than a kilometer (half a mile) long will also be enforced.
A square where major government institutions are located will be declared a “national security zone” made off-limits to the public, the Brasilia security authorities announced.
The Senate impeachment trial could last months, running through the Olympics, which open in Rio de Janeiro on August 5 – the first Games to be held in South America.
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