BRAZIL’S Workers’ Party (PT) today condemned President Jair Bolsonaro’s inauguration speech as consisting of “lies, hatred, unfounded promises and no concrete proposals to get Brazil out of crisis.”

Mr Bolsonaro took office on New Year’s Day and went on the attack immediately, vowing to “liberate” Brazil from “socialism,” attacking the PT governments of 2003-16 as having “conducted us to the worst ethical, moral and economic crisis in our history.”

In fact, those governments lifted tens of millions out of poverty, multiplied spending on education five times over, reduced child mortality by 73 per cent and introduced affordable housing for millions.

Unable to remove the PT at the ballot box, the right instead ousted then president Dilma Rousseff in a constitutional coup in 2016 and the courts stopped its most popular leader, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, from standing in last year’s election, which polls all showed him winning.

The new president’s claim to be ready to clamp down on corruption was a farce when he had appointed nine cabinet members who had been entangled with court cases for sleaze or misuse of public funds, the PT warned. 

A third of ministers are former army officers. Other appointments confirmed the president’s determination to privatise all remaining state assets: Economy Minister Paulo Guedes is a Chicago School free marketeer who lectured at the University of Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship. The new minister for human rights, family and women is an evangelical pastor, Damares Alves, who claims female orgasms are an invention of PT-controlled education ministries, schools need to be “cleansed” of “Marxist ideologies that promote homosexuality” and opposes abortion. 

Foreign Minister Ernesto Araujo says climate change is an invention of “cultural Marxists” and Vice-President Hamilton Mourao has pledged an end to Global South co-operation on international issues, saying that since the PT had promoted “South-South diplomacy we were involved with all that dirt-bag scum.”

Instead Mr Bolsonaro has pledged a closer relationship with the United States. The PT said this exposed the reality behind his motto, Brazil Above All: “In fact it is clear there is one above Brazil, Donald Trump’s government.”