Ruling on suit against Rousseff and Temer's 2014 re-election likely today

The outcome of a court dispute filed against the 2014 presidential re-election bid headed by Dilma Rousseff, with Michel Temer, now president of Brazil, as running mate, will be announced this Friday (June 9). After the recess of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), Justice Luiz Fux said on Thursday (8) that the bench had agreed that the reporting justice, Herman Benjamin, would hand down his final opinion to allow the other court members to issue theirs immediately.

The trial could annul the re-election of the Rousseff-Temer ticket over their campaign funding, potentially unseating Temer from presidency less than a year since Rousseff was impeached over government finance in 2016. The party of Rousseff's main contender in the 2014 race, Senator Aécio Neves (PSDB), is the plaintiff in the case.
 
The trial had been expected to last into the weekend, with Chief Justice Gilmar Mendes even calling additional hearings including on Saturday (10). But the TSE deal should allow a final ruling earlier than that.

Once reporting Justice Benjamin has handed down his opinion in the case, the other justices, Napoleão Nunes Maia, Admar Gonzaga, Tarcisio Vieira, Rosa Weber, Luiz Fux, and the Chief Justice, Gilmar Mendes, should issue theirs.

On Thursday (8), Benjamin said Rousseff and Temer had abused their political and economic power in the 2014 presidential race. But he noted the allegations were just as true of other parties. “We should not think for a second that this has been an innovation introduced by the defendants' parties [PT and PMDB] or some extraordinary conduct on their part, even though it has indeed tipped the scales in their favor—perhaps not detrimentally to the plaintiff [PSDB], as we now know, but to other candidates who ran at a complete disadvantage.”

Translated by Mayra Borges