Brazil’s Senate is having a marathon debate on whether President Dilma Rousseff should face a full impeachment trial, with the majority of the senators have already said they will vote against the president.
If this is confirmed in a vote to be held later, Ms Rousseff will be automatically suspended from office.
She is accused of illegally manipulating finances to hide a growing public deficit ahead of her re-election in 2014, which she denies, but Ms Rousseff made a last-ditch appeal to the Supreme Court to stop proceedings, but the move was rejected.
As at now ,a lengthy debate is under way which precedes the actual vote. The Senate session opened almost 18 hours ago.
There are a total of 81 senators in the upper house. Seventy-one registered to speak during the debate and each has been given 15 minutes for their speech.
Only after all of them have had their say will the electronic vote take place. This is not expected to happen before 06:00 local time (09:00GMT).
The session has been a lot less passionate than that in the lower house on 17 April in which a overwhelming majority of the 513 lawmakers voted in favour of the impeachment proceedings going ahead.
The members of the lower house cited all kinds of reason for their decision with many saying they were doing if “for my family”, “for God” or simply “the country”.
By 03:55 local time (06:55GMT), 60 senators had spoken.
Of those, 42 – a majority – backed the impeachment trial in their speeches, 18 rejected it and one did not give an indication as to how he would vote.
Ten senators have yet to speak.
In the Senate, the arguments given for the impeachment trial have been mainly economic.
Many blamed President Rousseff for the dire straits the country’s economy is in.
Brazil is suffering from its worst recession in 10 years, unemployment reached 9% in 2015 and inflation is at a 12-year high.
Senator Aecio Neves, who lost to Ms Rousseff in the 2014 presidential election, said: “Populist governments always act with fiscal irresponsibility and when they fail they appeal to the old ‘us vs
“The poorest and most vulnerable in society, who need the government support the most, always end up paying the bill,” he added.
