Bolsonaro's guru, Olavo de Carvalho, calls for Mandetta's resignation: 'Out with you, Minister Punhetta!'
Olavo de Carvalho, the "guru" of the Bolsonaro clan, has begun campaigning for the removal of Health Minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta. He claims Mandetta lacks "ideological loyalty" to Bolsonarism and now calls him "Minister Punhetta" (a derogatory term implying masturbation).
247 - Olavo de Carvalho, the ideological guru of Bolsonaro's movement, called for the resignation of Health Minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta on his Facebook page. "Out with you, Minister Punhetta!" he wrote.
The minister “is a typical example of what happens when a government chooses its high-ranking officials based on purely 'technical criteria,' without taking into account their ideological loyalty,” stated Olavo, who has a direct influence on Jair Bolsonaro's government – having nominated ministers such as Ernesto Araújo (Foreign Affairs) and Abraham Weintraub (Education).
"All that communists want most is for their opponents to try to defeat them by avoiding ideological combat," he concluded.
The attacks on the Minister of Health are part of a government tactic to force his resignation or dismiss him later on. Olavo, in this way, acts in conjunction with the rest of the Bolsonaro supporters and Bolsonaro himself, who has publicly attacked him.
At a recent dinner with the heads of the Legislative branch, Rodrigo Maia and Davi Alcolumbre, Mandetta revealed The president asked him, by phone, to resign from his post. To which he replied: "You fire me, Mr. President." The minister told parliamentarians that the situation in the Presidential Palace was "untenable."
The main reason for the crisis between the two is the issue of social isolation and quarantine as a way to contain the spread of the coronavirus. While the doctor defends the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO) for social isolation, Bolsonaro has started a campaign against quarantine ("Brazil Cannot Stop").
On social media, far-right digital activists began a campaign of embarrassment against the minister...linking it to corruption schemes to benefit large hospitals and developers of E-SUS technology (the digital version of the Unified Health System). Also, Osmar Terra, former minister under Temer and Bolsonaro – and currently considered a candidate to replace Mandetta – joined the campaign against the quarantine in the country, stating that this... increases cases of contamination.
According to the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Rodrigo Maia, Bolsonaro “They lack the courage to remove the minister and officially change the pandemic response policy."And that's why he's pressuring the minister to resign. The president confirmed this, stressing that he cannot 'fire a minister in the middle of a fight,' but that Mandetta 'is overstepping his bounds.' 'No minister of mine is irreplaceable,' he emphasized on Thursday, the 2nd."