Bolsonaro Considers Dismissing Health Minister at Any Moment

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – President Jair Bolsonaro has been telling his closest aides that he is “fed up with Mandetta,”, his Minister of Health, Luiz Henrique Mandetta. Bolsonaro has not dismissed him yet in order to avoid aggravating the crisis caused by the novel coronavirus pandemic.

The President has felt abandoned by part of the business community that supported him in the 2018 elections. He fears that Mandetta’s dismissal will lead to a final rupture with this group and the share of public opinion it represents.

But in any event, Bolsonaro has actually selected a successor to the Minister of Health: the president of ANVISA (National Health Surveillance Agency), Antonio Barra Torres, who is a Navy doctor.

Mandetta has stated that he will not abandon “technical criteria” in establishing rules to fight and prevent the coronavirus by the Ministry of Health.

The minister made it clear to Bolsonaro that he will not resign. In other words, he will cast all responsibility for his removal on the President’s shoulders.

As long as the deadlock persists, Bolsonaro intends to continue publicly challenging the Minister’s guidelines, such as social distancing. He did so on Sunday when he took to the streets in Brasília to visit stores and socialize with the population.

It will be a way of breaking a Minister who does not want to resign and to whom the President assigns the leak of conversations held between the two.

Bolsonaro’s annoyance extends to Mandetta’s party, the DEM (Democrats), which has two other ministers in government, Tereza Cristina, Minister of Agriculture, and Onyx Lorenzoni, Minister of Citizenship, who are also difficult to dismiss.

Onyx is a friend and one of the first politicians to support Bolsonaro’s candidacy to the Planalto. Tereza Cristina enjoys broad support from landowners, the president’s electoral base, and is doing what Bolsonaro himself describes as a “top- quality” job.

In addition to Mandetta, Bolsonaro is annoyed by the national president of the DEM party, the mayor of Salvador ACM Neto, who has publicly criticized the President’s role in the crisis.

In an interview, the DEM’s president stated that Jair Bolsonaro has insulted the families of the pandemic’s victims.

Another DEM who Bolsonaro believes has “betrayed” him is the governor of Goiás, Ronaldo Caiado. Bolsonaro has said he provided the governor with “full support” since the inception of the government ,and now Caiado refuses to accept the request to suspend the rules of social distancing enforced in the state.

Caiado called a press conference on Sunday in which he reiterated that Goiás “will continue to follow the World Health Organization’s recommendations” and that he strongly disagrees with Bolsonaro’s stand.

Source: UOL