Brazil’s suspended President Dilma Rousseff has promised to call a referendum on early elections in a last-ditch effort to avoid impeachment.<br /><br /> The Senate is due to hold a vote on August 25 on whether to remove Rousseff from office on charges that she doctored fiscal accounts to get re-elected in 2014.<br /><br /> In a public letter to lawmakers and the people she repeated that her impeachment would amount to a coup.<br /><br /> <br /><br /> “Those who can judge the president and remove the president for what she did, are the people and only the people, through elections.<br />I give my full support for a referendum, so the people can decide to call for early elections. And for political and electoral reform as well,” said Rousseff in her open letter.<br /><br /> While the vast majority of Brazilians didn’t approve of Rousseff’s administration in public opinion polls, many also have doubts over whether she should be forced from office.<br /><br /> However Rousseff’s speech is unlikely to move her opponents in the Senate, which last week voted 59 to 21 to move forward with a trial, the final stage in a month-long process that has divided the nation and paralyzed its politics. A vote for her permanent removal, at the end of her trial, requires a two-thirds majority, or 54 votes.<br /><br /> If Rousseff is removed by the Senate, interim President Michel Temer will serve out the rest of her term until 2018.<br /><br /> In addition Rousseff and former President Lula da Silva are reportedly being investigated for allegedly obstructing a corruption probe linked to the oil giant Petrobras.<br /><br /> The move is likely to escalate pressure on the two leading political figures, whose Workers Party has been ensnared for months in an ongoing bribes-for-state contracts scandal known in Brazil as “Operation Car Wash.”<br />
