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Last Updated on Thursday, 13 November 2014, 1:30 by GxMedia
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff
On Tuesday, Culture Minister Marta Suplicy had resigned and on Wednesday Labor Minister Manoel Dias; Development, Industry and Foreign Trade Minister Mauro Borges; Strategic Affairs Minister Marcelo Neri and cabinet chief Aloizio Mercadante all followed suit.
Rousseff had announced that she would revamp her cabinet, currently consisting of 39 ministers, for her second four-year term, due to begin on Jan. 1.
All the ministers who tendered their resignations said that they were leaving their posts to make it easier for Rousseff to reform the cabinet.
“We all know that when one government ends, a new one begins and, as the president herself announced during the campaign, it will be a ‘new government with new ideas,'” said Dias, recalling one of the slogans used by Rousseff’s reelection campaign.
The ministerial change that is generating the most anticipation in Brazil has already been confirmed by Rousseff and concerns Treasury Minister Guido Mantega, who will leave his post at the end of the year after serving there since 2006, when he was appointed by the president’s predecessor and mentor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
During the election campaign, financial market officials came out in favor of opposition candidate Sen. Aecio Neves, of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party, who was offering to implement a liberal economic policy.
Businessmen and the financial institutions, however, simultaneously criticized the “interventionist” character of the policy pushed by Mantega.
After Rousseff’s reelection in the runoff vote, the markets have been expecting the appointment of a more liberal treasury minister, and press reports are that it could be the former president of the country’s Central Bank, Henrique Meirelles, who served in that post during both of Da Silva’s administrations