Effort to impeach President Rousseff plunges into chaos

Interim speaker of lower house of Congress reverses his decision to annul the process

The fight over President Dilma Rousseff's future has taken a strange twist in Congress, with the interim speaker of Brazil's lower house of Congress on Tuesday saying he had reversed a decision to annul the impeachment.

Local media said Waldir Maranhao had "reversed the decision" to cancel the April vote by lawmakers that had first begun the process.

His move clears the way for Rousseff's impeachment, after Senate President Renan Calheiros on Monday dismissed Maranhao's initial decision and said the upper house would go ahead with the impeachment vote anyway.

Maranhao's U-turn ends a rift among Congress leaders that Rousseff's supporters had hoped to exploit in order to oppose her impeachment after the process descended into confusion.

Maranhao threw the vote into chaos by declaring that the whole process was flawed and should be brought back to square one.

The original vote by lower house deputies sending Rousseff to face the Senate had "prejudged" the president and denied her "the right to a full defense", Maranhao said.

He called for the Senate to halt proceedings and for the lower house to hold a new vote.

The order prompted consternation in the Brazilian capital, with Rousseff's allies seeing a possible escape route for the president and her opponents reacting furiously.

Rousseff - who faces being suspended from office if the Senate votes to open an impeachment trial, expected on Wednesday - huddled in an emergency meeting with ministers as she waited to see how the Senate would react.

Calheiros did not take long.

"I ignore" the order, he said in a nationally televised session to raucous applause and angry shouting from rival senators on the floor.

Calheiros called Maranhao's intervention in the impeachment "absolutely untimely".

Corruption charges

Maranhao, the man at the center of the latest episode, is little-known to most Brazilians.

He took the post of speaker only last week as a replacement for veteran Eduardo Cunha, the architect of the controversial impeachment drive whom the Supreme Court forced to stand down over corruption charges.

The impeachment battle has taken so many unexpected twists that Brazilians refer to it as a real-life version of the political drama House of Cards.

It comes as the country has descended into economic crisis and corruption scandals have hurt many leading politicians.

Rousseff was accused of illegally manipulating government budget accounts during her 2014 re-election battle.

Her removal is looking increasingly certain after an overwhelming majority of the lower house voted in mid-April to send her case to the Senate.

In the Senate, around 50 of the 81 senators have already said they planned to vote in favor of an impeachment trial, well over the simple majority needed to open the process.