Brazil’s president-elect, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, intends to appoint a civilian as the new Minister of Defense, thus breaking with the previous legislature in which there was a constant presence of military personnel within the government, and among the candidates would be Supreme Court Judge Ricardo Lewandowski.
Judge Lewandowski is very much to Lula’s liking, although the government transition team suspects that his appointment could cause a stir within the military institutions, after many members of the military have also taken up the criticism of the Supreme Court by the outgoing president, Jair Bolsonaro.
Lula’s goal is to have a Minister of Defense who on the one hand has a good dialogue with the Armed Forces, but at the same time knows how to reduce the influence that the military has had so far in Brazilian politics.
Unlike other portfolios, in which the names that will occupy the different areas are already well defined, in Defense there are many areas in which there is still no consensus. These are the cases of the Institutional Security Cabinet (GSI) and the Intelligence Agency, both vacant.
In view of the lack of consensus, many believe that Vice President-elect Geraldo Alckmin could be a good liaison between the future government and the military, thanks to the respect they have for him. However, Lula himself has previously ruled out that his ‘number two’ would be the head of a ministry.
Another name on the table is that of former Foreign Minister Aloysio Nunes, from the conservative Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) and an ally of Alckmin, who, however, is not liked by the Workers’ Party (PT), according to the newspaper ‘O Globo’.
Celso Amorim, former Minister of Foreign Affairs under Lula and former Minister of Defense under Dilma Rousseff, also sounds, although he would not be the preferred option for the military leadership, which would welcome José Aldo Rebelo, who held several portfolios with the former Brazilian president, among them Defense.
