“There’s still a lot to be done,” Lula says at ministerial meeting
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva coordinated the first ministerial meeting of 2024 on Monday (Mar. 18) and said that “there’s still a lot to be done.” In his view, the country was “totally abandoned” by the previous government and came really close to suffering a coup d’état.
“We still have a lot to do, across all sectors. And no wonder, it’s everything we committed to doing during the election campaign. A year and three months into our mandate and you can see how little we’ve done and at the same time how much we’ve done. I doubt anyone would have been able to do it if it hadn’t been for the individual efforts of each one of you,” President Lula told his ministers during the opening of the meeting broadcast on social media, also aired on Canal Gov.
The president criticized the previous government. His predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, he said, was focused on “stimulating hatred between people” instead of planning social policies.
During the meeting at the Planalto presidential palace, he pointed out that a number of ministries were short-staffed and that it had not yet been possible to meet all the demand for civil service exams. Most of the ministries, he went on to say, had no policies aimed at social inclusion and others had been completely closed down, like the Ministry of Culture.
“So everyone here is aware of the rubble they were left with when we took office,” the president said, citing actions carried out since the beginning of his term, such as the recovery of such initiatives as the People’s Drugstore, More Doctors, Bolsa Família, in addition to educational programs, the reduction of unemployment and the resumption of the foreign policy, with the opening of 98 new markets for Brazilian agricultural products.
Coup d’état
The president also commented on the recently disclosed statements of the former commanders of the Armed Forces to the Federal Police. Brazil, he said, “ran a serious risk” of entering a new anti-democratic period following the attempted coup d'état on January 8, 2023, when government headquarters were ransacked in Brasília.
“If, three months ago, when we spoke of a coup, it seemed like just an insinuation, today we are certain that this country has run a serious risk of facing a coup following the 2022 elections,” he said, also praising the refusal of Armed Forces commanders to join the plot to stage the coup.
According to statements by the former Army commander Marco Antonio Freire Gomes and onetime Air Force Commander Carlos Almeida Baptista Júnior Bolsonaro stood at the center of conspiracies for a democratic rupture.
To President Lula’s judgment, now is the time to strengthen democracy. “The people were wiser, braver, and we are here with the task of doing something very important, which is not just solving the problem of the economy, health, transportation, agriculture—we have to solve something much more serious: the consolidation of the democratic process in this country. Democracy has become fundamental in our lives,” he declared.
