Dilma Rousseff under fire for right-wing appointments to cabinet

Having tacked to the left during a deeply polarised campaign to secure re-election in October, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff is coming under fire from allies over a series of right-wing choices for her new cabinet.

Rousseff, ahead of her swearing-in for a second four-year term on New Year’s Day, shocked many on Brazil’s left when she nominated senator Kátia Abreu for the powerful agriculture portfolio.

Abreu was a member of Brazil’s main right-wing party before she switched to a coalition ally of the president’s Workers Party. She is also head of the agribusiness sector’s main lobby group, a position she has used to attack land reform, environmental controls and efforts to secure indigenous communities title to their traditional lands.

Her appointment has been attacked by Brazil’s Landless Movement, which represents the millions of Brazilian peasants demanding land reform, which has been linked to the Workers Party for decades.

Movement leader Alexandre Conceição said Abreu's appointment was "a mistake" and would mean "more poison on the table, more slave labour and more repression of indigenous and quilombo [descendants of runaway slaves] communities".

Meanwhile, Rousseff's nomination of former São Paulo mayor Gilberto Kassab to the powerful cities ministry has been described as "sinister" by the urban homeless movement MTST, which backed her re-election.

Writing in the Folha de S Paulo newspaper, MTST leader Guilherme Boulos accused Kassab, who was a member of the same right-wing party as Abreu, of being a representative of the country's construction companies and that during his time as mayor there was a "boom" in suspicious arson attacks on favelas occupying prime real estate. "Kassab, just like Kátia Abreu, is a symbol of anti-popular politics, she in the countryside, him in the city," wrote Boulos.

Questions have also been raised about Rousseff’s commitment to a national pact against corruption, an idea she floated in the light of a multibillion-euro scandal in the state-controlled energy giant Petrobras.

Earlier this year, Kassab was convicted of administrative improbity during his time as mayor of São Paulo, a charge also faced by her new fisheries minister, Helder Barbalho. Abreu faces charges of using illicit campaign funds in her 2010 senate campaign.

Another nomination that raised eyebrows was that of George Hilton to the sports ministry. A pastor in an evangelical church, in 2005 he was found by airport police to be travelling with €200,000 in cash. He claimed the money was made up of donations from church members but he was still expelled from the same right-wing party of which Abreu and Kassab were members because of doubts over his activities.

Also unhappy are members of the country’s scientific community, who have expressed concern about the nomination of Aldo Rebelo to science. In 2010, the communist party leader dismissed global warming as a theory designed to “control patterns of consumption by poor countries”.

Meanwhile, the opposition has accused Rousseff of "electoral fraud" after she appointed Joaquim Levy, an orthodox University of Chicago-trained economist, as her finance minister with a brief to cut spending in a bid to stabilise a deterioration in the public accounts.

During the campaign Rousseff claimed her opponents would inflict austerity on Brazilians if she lost, but since her victory, she has accepted that spending cuts will have to be made, subsidies to consumers unwound and interest rates raised to combat inflation, leaving many analysts predicting little or no growth in 2015.

“Every move by the president in this post-election period shows she deceived Brazilians,” said opposition leader Mendonça Filho.

Although more than half of the 39 cabinet-level positions are still to be filled, it is clear that the Workers Party will see its influence reduced in a second Rousseff administration, sparking discontent among party militants. The party has lost control over the education ministry, the portfolio that comes with the most discretionary spending, to the small PROS party.

However, a survey by the Getúlio Vargas Foundation shows the party will still control 44 per cent of the federal government’s investment budget, the largest of any member of the ruling coalition.