Brazilian President Lula Pledges To Reopen The Country’s Ministry Of Culture

deadline.com:

Brazil’s newly elected President, Inácio Lula da Silva, has said his government will re-establish the country’s Ministry of Culture after it was disbanded by his right-wing predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, in 2019.

In a series of widescale pledges published on his first day in office, Lula said his government will reopen the ministry “with the ambition to resume more intensely the policies of incentive and access to cultural goods” that he said was “interrupted by obscurantism in recent years.” “A democratic cultural policy cannot fear criticism or elect favorites,” he said.

Lula, who is serving his third term in office, added: “May all the flowers sprout and all the fruits of our creativity be harvested, may everyone enjoy it without censorship or discrimination.”Estamos refundando o Ministério da Cultura, com a ambição de retomar mais intensamente as políticas de incentivo e de acesso aos bens culturais, interrompidas pelo obscurantismo nos últimos anos.

Uma política cultural democrática não pode temer a crítica nem eleger favoritos. Bolsonaro disbanded the Ministry of Culture on his first day as President in 2019, folding the high office into a new government department with the offices for social policy and sports to create the ‘ministry of citizenship’ as part of a policy to reduce the number of state offices.