Parliament in Brazil has voted to start impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff over charges of manipulating government accounts, BBC reports.
The “yes” camp comfortably won the required two-thirds majority in the vote in the lower house in Brasilia.
The motion will now go to the upper house, the Senate, which is expected to suspend Ms Rousseff next month while it carries out a formal trial.
She denies tampering with the accounts to help secure her re-election in 2014.
Her supporters describe the vote as a “coup against democracy” and the ruling Workers’ Party has promised to continue its fight to defend her “in the streets and in the Senate”.
But Ms Rousseff is an unpopular leader in a country facing a severe economic crisis, the BBC’s Wyre Davis reports from Brazil
Impeachment supporters netted 367 votes in the lower house of Congress, well above the 342 they needed.
The “no” camp took 137 votes, seven deputies abstained and two did not show for the ballot.
Victory celebrations were loud and colourful among the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators who watched the vote live on huge TV screens on city streets across the country.
