Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva receives former President of Uruguay José Mujica at the Planalto Palace in Brasilia.Andre Borges (EFE)
Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 77, maintains close ties with some of the parties best known for offering parliamentary support in exchange for hefty budget offices. In that regard, after a 40-day soap opera of comings and goings this Friday, Lula named Celso Sabino tourism minister, replacing Daniela Carneiro, an evangelical married to a powerful mayor of the metropolitan Rio de Janeiro region. janeiro. The president, who does not have a parliamentary majority, is trying to broaden his base of support in Congress to implement his plans.
With this move, Lula loses one of the 11 ministers in the 37-department cabinet with which he began his mandate. The outgoing Carneiro fell because she left the party with which she became a minister. Even in his first days in office, he survived the open crisis because of his relationships with politicians linked to paramilitary groups. This is the second change of ministers in the government in six months. The previous one was the dismissal of the sole military minister due to a lack of confidence.
Lula has resisted making the replacement official for so many weeks that the confirmation of the decision by decree in the Diario de la Unión went unnoticed in the local press. That had happened a long time ago, all that was missing was the signature of the head of state.
But this replacement underscores the weak situation in which the president finds himself, who won by a narrow margin at the head of a broad coalition to save democracy and has been working to expand it ever since he took office. Despite the pressure, Lula makes it clear that he’s setting the pace. And while political Brazil watched in slow motion minute by minute the fall of a minister and the arrival of her successor, the President resumed some of his most successful policies and met with political leaders. Foreigners at home or on the go. These days it is launching a program to allow the poorest of the 78% of indebted Brazilians to negotiate with the banks and get their names off the list of debtors, removing or encouraging subsidies to the civil-military schools created by Jair Bolsonaro National vaccination program before flying to Brussels on Saturday to attend an EU Celac summit.
The so-called Centrão parties are the candidates courted by the executive. This great center is a constellation of acronyms sewn together by sheer interests – not ideology, but always inclined to conservatism – and with an extraordinary instinct for survival. Always keen to offer the votes of their MPs and then collect the bill. Many of the MPs in this amorphous group voted in favor of tax reform last week and now want their share in the form of ministries with power and budgets. They trust that the tourism portfolio is only the first upfront payment. According to the Brazilian press, they even dream of one of the crown jewels, the Ministry of Social Development, whose flagship program is Bolsa Família, the Labor Party’s best electoral brand.
The Centrão parties are the ones who dumped Dilma Rousseff and the ones who kept the countless impeachment proposals against Jair Bolsonaro from even being debated in Congress.
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