Brasília, Brazil: Rival protesters gathered Sunday outside Brazil’s Congress for a vote on President Dilma Rousseff’s political future like fans at a tense football final, waving flags, wearing opposing colours and separated by a wall.

Workers installed four large television screens on each side of the kilometre-long metal barrier for the crowds to follow the action—and keep score—as the lower house of Congress votes on whether to send an impeachment measure to the Senate.

The leftist leader’s supporters, clad in red, trickled in through police checkpoints on the left side of the kilometre (half-mile) long metal barrier, while her opponents, wearing Brazil’s yellow and green colours, flocked to the right side.

Protests were being organized in other cities, with more than 1,000 government supporters gathering early in front of Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beach.

Brasilia’s wall has become a symbol of the country’s ideological divide amid political and economic crises just four months before Rio de Janeiro hosts the Summer Olympics.

‘This wall simply shows that the Brazilian people are not prepared to accept different opinions,’ said Yuri Oliveira, 28, a physics professor from southern Minas Gerais state who rode a bus 14 hours to come to Brasilia.

Draped in Brazil’s flag, Oliveira said that if Rousseff is ousted by the Senate, ‘I fear a serious conflict, violent acts.’

A lot to lose

A few thousand anti-Rousseff demonstrators began to gather on the right side of the wall, blowing on vuvuzelas, playing music and shouting for the ouster of Rousseff and her Workers Party.

Rousseff, whose approval rating has plunged to a dismal 10 percent, faces charges of embellishing public accounts to mask the budget deficit during her 2014 re-election.

But opponents are also angry at the country’s deep recession and a massive corruption scandal at state oil giant Petrobras that has involved top politicians.

A smaller crowd of a few hundred people arrived on the left side early Sunday, some chanting ‘there won’t be a coup, there will be struggle,’ in reference to Rousseff’s claim that the vote amounts to a putsch attempt.

But the protesters are expected to swell to hundreds of thousands of people on both sides as the day goes on, with the vote due to last several hours into the evening.

Eric Gamaliel, a 29-year-old psychologist from the northeastern state of Bahia, said he fears that Brazil will lose the education, health and social gains that came under Rousseff and her predecessor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, if the president is ousted.

‘Brazil would lose a lot. The world would lose a lot. It would be a step backward,’ Gamaliel said, wearing a red shirt.

But to the people on the right side of the fence, Rousseff’s impeachment would be a step forward even though her potential successor and former ally, Vice President Michel Temer, and the man leading the impeachment drive, House Speaker Eduardo Cunha, have themselves been tainted by corruption scandals.

‘I’m tired of the corruption. I know the Workers Party is not the only corrupt party, but it’s the one in power and it has to leave,’ said Daniel Quagleliato, 27, an agronomy student from Sao Paulo.

Rosilene Oliveira, a 58-year-old unemployed woman from Brasilia, said the country was ‘paralyzed.’

‘If impeachment is not approved, it will go on like this, stalled,’ she said. ‘Dilma’s exit is a first step for the country to move forward.’