Lula moves to undo Bolsonaro policies with first decrees

In both of his inaugural speeches on Sunday, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva unleashed a full-scale assault on his predecessor’s legacy.

Moving with urgency, Lula signed decrees rolling back Mr. Bolsonaro’s permissive gun control agenda, lenient environmental policies, and his stance on government transparency. On his first day in office, the new president signed 129 decrees and four provisional measures. On Monday, another 13 decrees were published.

Some are mere formalities, such as those swearing in his new ministers and firing people in strategic positions. Others set the tone of the new administration.

For instance, Lula created the Indigenous Peoples Ministry and revived the Racial Equality Ministry. The newly-inaugurated president understands that underserved communities need special policies, a view that was challenged during the Bolsonaro administration. The far-right dismisses such policies as “whining.”

A roadmap of how to reverse the Jair Bolsonaro agenda had been laid down in November by a think tank connected to the Socialism and Freedom Party (Psol). In a report published during the transition period, the think tank proposed the revocation of policies in bulk, as a way to revert what it called “the destruction caused by the Bolsonaro administration.”

Here are the main changes promoted by Lula’s first moves in office.

Economy: privatizations stalled; new fiscal rule in the works

Lula signed an executive order which excludes major state companies from a privatization program, such as oil and gas giant Petrobras, Brazil’s postal service (Correios), and data-processing service Dataprev.

The Bolsonaro administration managed to privatize Eletrobras through a follow-on stock offering, but its record on privatizations left a lot to be desired for pro-market pundits. In August 2020, then-Privatizations Secretary Salim Mattar resigned in reaction to a lack...