Brazil Impeachment Explained: President Dilma Rousseff Removed After Senate Vote

Brazil's drawn out drama over President Dilma Rousseff, which continued even as the country played host to the 2016 Summer Olympics this month, is finally over.

The South American country's Senate voted Wednesday to remove Rousseff, Brazil's first female president, by a vote of 60 to 21, according to Reuters. The decision brings a close to the nearly nine month ordeal that began when Rousseff was accused of ignoring Brazil's budget laws while in office along with other administrative misconduct.

The drama officially began when Brazil's Senate formally voted to begin the impeachment process in May, suspending Rousseff by a vote of 55 to 22. In August, the Senate voted to indict Rousseff on charges that she manipulated the federal budget in order to hide the mounting economic woes facing Brazil as a result of an historic recession. The indictment led to a bitter Senate trial that consumed the country even while the world's eyes were on Rio for most of August during the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. The impeachment trial culminated in Wednesday's vote, which required a two-thirds majority in the Senate to permanently remove Rousseff from office.

Rousseff has maintained that everything she was accused of was commonplace for her predecessors, according to the New York Times. Her supporters consider the controversy a convenient excuse to stage a political coup. In recent years, Rousseff's popularity had dwindled amid multiple political corruption scandals in Brazil's government and the country's largest economic collapse in history. Her lack of charisma and dismissive attitude towards the crises did not do much to curry favor with Brazilians.

Rousseff's ousting marks the end of more than a decade of leadership from Brazil's left-leaning Worker's Party. Vice President Michel Temer, a conservative who has run the country since Rousseff's suspension in May, will take over permanently as president until the end of Rousseff's term in 2018.

There was at least one silver lining for Rousseff Wednesday: Her political career may not be finished after a separate vote that could have prevented her from holding public office in Brazil for eight years failed to pass, the BBC reported.