President of the Supreme Electoral Court Gilmar Mendes broke a three-three tie between the other six judges on the panel to absolve Temer of charges that he used illegal campaign financing to secure a win in the 2014 presidential elections when he ran as vice president and Dilma Rousseff as president.
Mr. Temer was re-elected Brazil's vice president in 2014, and became president a year ago when his running mate Dilma Rousseff was removed from office following an impeachment process unrelated to the case before the electoral court.
Temer, whose approval rate is 4%, is also being investigated on allegations of approving the payment of hush money to impeached lower house speaker Eduardo Cunha, who is now serving a 15-year prison sentence for corruption, money laundering and tax evasion.
President Michel Temer is fighting new allegations that his administration turned Brazil's spy services on a supreme court justice investigating him for corruption, the latest in a series of accusations weighing on his tenure.
Last month, a recording emerged that apparently captured Temer endorsing a plan to pay hush money to ex-House Speaker Eduardo Cunha, who is serving 15 years in prison for corruption and money laundering.
Temer was clearly invigorated, greeting the TSE victory as "a sign that the national institutions continue to guarantee the smooth functioning of Brazilian democracy", his spokesman said. "There are serious proven facts but not enough to annul the mandate".
Temer denied the accusation in a statement.
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Many of Temer's allies, weakened by corruption allegations and unwilling to destabilise even further Brazil's rattled political establishment, are now less likely to abandon the President.
The court looked at whether the Rousseff-Temer presidential campaign in 2014 should have been invalidated because of illegal campaign donations. Temer took over after Rousseff was removed past year for illegal management of the federal budget.
Among the most dramatic came during the opening of the afternoon session Friday, when a prosecutor requested the disqualification of one of the judges who had once been a lawyer for Rousseff and one justice decried articles in the press that linked him to a corruption investigation.
The case was filed shortly after the 2014 vote when one of losing parties alleged that the campaign of Rousseff and Temer gained an unfair advantage through illegal campaign contributions. While the overhauls are deeply unpopular among Brazilians, many economists say they are necessary to help pull Latin America's largest nation from recession. A secret recording surfaced on which Temer and Joesley Batista, the president of a multinational food processing company named JBS, can be heard talking about paying bribes. The 76-year-old Temer remains in trouble.
Ironically, Temer's strongest claim to stay in power is the argument that he can deliver major reforms to labor laws and the country's pension system.
Mendes, who backed the impeachment of Rousseff, said the country should not expect the court to solve the current political crisis.
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