Politics
A Supreme Court ruling on Tuesday won President Dilma Rousseff more time to muster votes in Congress to block opposition efforts to impeach her on charges of manipulating government accounts, reports Reuters.
Opposition parties had planned to force a vote in the lower house that could have opened proceedings to impeach the president as early as this week.
But a Supreme Court justice suspended the maneuver with an injunction sought by lawmakers of the ruling Workers' Party. Brazil's worst recession in 25 years and a huge corruption scandal at state-run oil company Petrobras have pushed Rousseff's approval ratings into single digits and put her political survival at risk.
Nine months into her second term, polls show two-thirds of Brazilians want to see her impeached.
The Supreme Court's decision gives her some extra time to line up her supporters in Congress, although the speaker of the lower house Eduardo Cunha insisted on Tuesday he would continue to review impeachment requests despite the injunction.
"The decision on impeachment requests is a constitutional prerogative I have and it is not being questioned. I continue to have this prerogative and I will use it," said Cunha, a former ally of Rousseff's who recently defected to the opposition.
