Brazil's interim leader, Michel Temer, brushes off complaints about 'country club' cabinet

Temer has other things to worry about, from the crashing economy to the Petrobras probe

Michel Temer has appointed a new cabinet of wealthy, privileged, white, male politicians like himself (Getty)

Brazil’s interim President Michel Temer is brushing off critics appalled by his failure to include a single woman in his 23-member cabinet saying he will consider females “a little further ahead”. It is also, remarkably, all white.

The country club-looking team was assembled by Mr Temer after he replaced President Dilma Rousseff following her suspension a week ago to face an impeachment trial. It has fueled suspicion on the left that he is returning Brazil to a model of government-by-the-elite amidst a wholesale rejection of the progressive legacy left by Ms Rousseff’s now displaced Workers Party.

In a meeting with female members on Congress last week, Mr Temer offered no concrete action to add diversity to the cabinet - whites make up less than half the country’s population - and merely pleaded for patience with a promise to add women to the goverment down the line.

“He asked us for some time,” Josi Nunes, a member of Mr Temer’s Democratic Movement Party, told reporters after the confab in Brasilia. “I told him that in the decision-making table of the ministries it is necessary to have a woman. He also said he will work on issues of women, the elderly, the young and the handicapped.”

Ms Rousseff offered her own tart assessment of Mr Temer’s ministerial picks on her Facebook page suggesting that women would rather not be treated like a “decorative fetish”. If, as most people expect, she is found guilty of fixing the country’s budget books at her trial, Mr Temer, 75, would serve out what would have been the remainder of her second term to the end of 2018.

It may not have helped that Mr Temer indicated that should Ms Rousseff be permanently ousted he had his wife, Marcela Temer, a 32-year-old former model, in mind to head social policy in his government. Quizzed in a televised interview if she was qualified, he said, “Yes, she is a lawyer and has a lot of concern of social issues”. It does not appear she is a lawyer, however.

“For a moment, it looked like we had retrogressed to the start of the last century,” despaired Luiza Nagib Eluf, a former prosecutor, author and columnist.

There was also a rebuke last week from the Washington DC-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an agency the Organisation of American States.

“The designation of a cabinet of ministers that does not include any women or persons of African descent leaves more than half the population excluded from the highest government offices,” IACHR said in a press statement. “The last time Brazil had a cabinet with no female ministers was during the military dictatorship.”

The urgency and complexity of the challenges facing Mr Temer, combined with the fragility of his own coalition in Congress, means the storm over his cabinet profile will not be his greatest concern for now. In addition to Brazil’s daunting economic crisis, he faces intense pressure to tackle the nation’s ongoing corruption scandal involving Petrobras, the state oil giant. There is also the ongoing Zika virus to contain, in addition to completing preperations for the Summer Olympic Games that open in Rio de Janeiro in August.

He may also feel more or less free to ignore those railing against him since he was neither elected to the top job nor, he says, will he run after 2018. “I do not need to practice gestures or actions leading to a possible re-election. I can even be – shall we say – unpopular as long as it produces benefits for the country. For me, that would be enough,” he told a local news station.

On Thursday, Mr Temer picked a new head of Petrobras in hopes of giving the deeply troubled corporation a clean sheet. The appointment of Pedro Parente, a former chief of staff and energy minister under former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, will be considered by the board on Monday. Shares in Petrobras ticked up sharply on Friday in reaction to the choice.

Yet, Mr Temer further shocked observers by choosing seven ministers who have directly been cited in the Petrobras probe, involving graft and kick-backs. Three of them, including planning minister Romero Jucá, are under formal investigation. Mr Temer has also been mentioned in the probe; should he come under direct investigation, his hold on power might quickly slip.

Last week Mr Temer was also forced to clean up a mess left by his just-appointed Justice Minister, Alexandre de Moraes, after he made remarks suggesting the new government was about to challenge the independence of the state prosecutors office, which in turn fueled suspicion that it was looking for ways to stymie the ongoing graft investigations.

The many-tentacled probe has already ensnared top figures both of Ms Rousseff’s Workers Party and of Mr Temer’s Democratic Movement Party. Mr Temer said he would not attempt to interfere with the investigation and would dismiss any minister charged directly in the case.

Better marks have been awarded to him by economists who wonder how quickly the interim president can move to reverse Brazil’s economic spiral, which has seen the country’s budget deficit reach dangerous proportions, an alarming decline in economic output and rising unemployment, which together have created the worst recession since the 1930s.

Mr Temer picked a widely respected former central bank president, Henrique Meirelles, as his finance minister and one of the country’s most admired economists, Ilan Goldfajn, of Brazil's largest private sector bank Itaú Unibanco, as its new central bank governor.

The austerity prescriptions that are surely coming - a scaling back of underfunded pension commitments as well severe cuts in other areas of social spending - will, however, confirm the shift away from the progressivism championed by the Workers Party of Ms Rousseff and her predecessor as president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, towards a more neoliberal future for Brazil.