BRAZIL’S FIRST woman president hit the ground running yesterday, spending her first full day in power holding meetings in her office in the Planalto presidential palace while her compatriots recovered from their new year celebrations.
Dilma Rousseff was sworn in on Saturday afternoon at a ceremony in the capital Brasília, promising to eradicate extreme poverty and turn Brazil into a solidly middle-class country. Normally described as dour and uncharismatic, Ms Rousseff was moved to tears several times during Saturday’s ceremonies that accompanied her taking over from Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Mr Lula, the most popular leader in Brazil’s history, later received an ecstatic welcome on his return to his home city of São Bernardo in greater São Paulo. “I had to prove that a metal worker could govern better than the others,” he told crowds, “and I return now able to look you in the eye.”
In Ms Rousseff’s speech before a joint session of congress, she also promised to combat the growing problem of corruption in the country, a task complicated by the composition of her 10-party coalition.
Her Workers Party’s main ally in government is the PMDB, the Democratic Movement of Brazil, which has a history of selling its political support in return for access to the kickback schemes that riddle Brazil’s public service.
Seated beside the new president as she made her anti-graft pledge was Brazil’s former president and outgoing head of the senate José Sarney, who as one of Democratic Movement’s main chieftains, has survived decades of multiple corruption allegations.
Ms Rousseff’s vice-president, Michel Temer, also comes from that party, which has the biggest bloc in the upper house. Mr Temer’s second wife, a former beauty queen 43 years his junior, was the most commented on person at the inauguration by Twitter users.
Later at a ceremony for foreign dignitaries, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton was seen chatting amiably with Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez while they waited to greet Ms Rousseff. The cordial scene followed a week in which the latest spat between the two countries left them without ambassadorial representation.
Venezuela rejected the credentials of the new US ambassador to Caracas after he criticised the Chávez government during his Senate confirmation hearings. In retaliation, Washington cancelled the visa of Venezuela’s ambassador to the US while he was back home on holidays.
Mr Chávez, who had dared the US to break off all diplomatic relations, later told Venezuelan state television: “It was a pleasant moment and we took advantage of it and spoke of two or three timely things.”
The main source of tension at the ceremony was between Brazil itself and Italy, which is furious that in one of his last acts as president, Mr Lula granted asylum to a former Italian left-wing extremist wanted in Italy for murder.
Cesare Battisti sought refuge in Brazil in 2004 after stints on the run in Mexico and France. He was sentenced to life in prison in Italy in 1987 for four killings carried out by the Armed Proletarians for Communism group. Leading figures within the Workers’ Party, themselves former left-wing extremists who were jailed or exiled during the country’s military dictatorship, have adopted Battisti, today a successful novelist, as a cause célèbre.
On Friday, Mr Lula granted Battisti immigrant status in Brazil, arguing that his life would be at risk if he was returned to Italy.
This sparked a furious reaction from the government in Rome which has ordered home its ambassador and is threatening to take the case to the International Court in The Hague.
The ambassador stayed to attend Ms Rousseff’s inauguration but presented a letter of protest at Mr Lula’s decision, which Italy’s foreign minister has described as “unthinkable”.