Ten years after Dilma Rousseff was removed from Brazil’s presidency, her ouster remains a defining episode in the country’s recent political history. On August 31, 2016, the Brazilian Senate voted 61 to 20 to remove Rousseff from office, ending thirteen years of federal governments led by the Workers’ Party (PT).
Rousseff, a left-wing economist and former opponent of Brazil’s military dictatorship, had become the country’s first female president after winning the 2010 election with 56 percent of the vote. She was re-elected in October 2014, receiving 54.5 million votes, or 51.6 percent, against Aécio Neves of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party.
Her presidency followed years in which the Workers’ Party administration had prioritised social programmes and public investment. Between 2003 and 2014, Brazil implemented programmes that reduced poverty and brought unemployment to a historic low of 4.8 percent in late 2014. During the same period, the United Nations removed Brazil from its World Hunger Map.
The Rousseff administration continued public investment in education, healthcare and housing, including through the “My House, My Life” (Minha Casa, Minha Vida) programme. Her government also oversaw policies concerning the Pre-Salt oil fields, with Law 12.858 directing royalties from the reserves towards education and public health services.
Rousseff’s political career had been shaped by her opposition to Brazil’s military regime. Born in Belo Horizonte in 1947, she joined left-wing resistance groups as a young woman following the 1964 military coup. Security forces arrested her in São Paulo in January 1970, and she spent three years in detention, where she later testified that she was subjected to electric shocks and beatings.
After her release in 1972 and subsequent political rehabilitation during the redemocratisation period of the 1980s, Rousseff entered public administration in Porto Alegre. She later served as State Secretary of Energy, Mining and Communication before joining the Workers’ Party in 2001.
After Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was elected president in 2002, Rousseff became Minister of Mines and Energy. She later served as his Chief of Staff, coordinating the Growth Acceleration Programme, or PAC, which directed public investment towards transport, housing and energy infrastructure.
Her second presidential term, however, began amid economic contraction and growing political opposition. The defeated opposition party formally contested the 2014 election results, while Operation Car Wash, a federal judicial investigation into corruption involving major construction firms and state enterprises, contributed to growing institutional instability.
In December 2015, Eduardo Cunha, Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, authorised impeachment proceedings against Rousseff. The case centred on what were described as fiscal delay manoeuvres, involving delayed payments by the government to state banks for social programmes including the agricultural subsidy programme Plano Safra.
Rousseff and her legal team argued that similar budgetary practices had been used by previous presidential administrations and provincial governors and did not constitute high crimes or administrative improbity under the Brazilian Constitution.
On August 29, 2016, Rousseff addressed the Senate during her defence, declaring: “I fought against the dictatorship. I have the mark of torture on my body… I have committed no crime of responsibility.” Two days later, senators voted to remove her, and Vice President Michel Temer assumed the presidency.
Subsequent legal developments placed renewed attention on the basis of the impeachment. Independent audits by technical experts from the Senate and the Federal Prosecutor’s Office concluded that Rousseff had not directed or committed administrative improbity concerning the fiscal manoeuvres. In August 2023, the Federal Regional Court of the 1st Region unanimously upheld the dismissal of an administrative improbity lawsuit against her, affirming earlier findings by the 10th Federal Court of Brasília.
Meanwhile, Operation Car Wash faced its own legal challenges following revelations from the Vaza Jato leaks concerning private communications between prosecutors and judge Sérgio Moro. The Supreme Federal Court later ruled Moro biased in related cases and annulled convictions across the investigation framework.
Rousseff subsequently returned to a prominent international role. After Lula won a third presidential term in 2022, she resumed public leadership activities and, in March 2023, was elected president of the New Development Bank, established by the BRICS nations.
From underground resistance during dictatorship to Brazil’s presidency and leadership of a major multilateral financial institution, Rousseff’s political trajectory has come to embody the dramatic shifts in Brazil’s democratic and economic institutions over the past six decades.
