Exit of BNDES president another ideological whim of Bolsonaro government

Almost six months in, another member of the Jair Bolsonaro administration has bitten the bullet. The latest victim is Joaquim Levy, the head of the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES), who resigned on Sunday morning under pressure from the president himself.

The justification for this unrest was Mr. Levy’s appointment of lawyer Marcos Barbosa Pinto to lead the bank’s stock market division. Mr. Pinto served as an advisor to the BNDES during the Workers’ Party government, the group which remains public enemy number one, as far as Jair Bolsonaro and his cronies are concerned.

While claiming his government only makes “technical appointments” and is run without ideological bias, the pressure on Mr. Levy, and the isolation of Marcos Barbosa Pinto are further examples of the Bolsonaro administration purging government workers based on connections to the Workers’ Party.

Joaquim Levy is something of an ever-present in Brazilian government. Under former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso he served as the deputy secretary of Financial Policy in the Ministry of Finance, and then went on to become the chief economist of Mr. Cardoso’s Ministry...