Brazil’s new first lady says presidential palace a mess

Agencies | Brasília

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com   

As Brazil’s new government held its first meeting Friday, the new first lady got down to business too, dealing with what she called major damage, leaks, and missing artwork and furniture at the presidential palace.

First Lady Rosangela “Janja” da Silva gave Brazil’s biggest broadcaster, TV Globo, a tour of the Alvorada Palace, the presidential residence in Brasilia, to highlight what she described as its shoddy condition at the end of far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro’s four-year tenancy.

Da Silva, who married newly inaugurated leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in May, said important parts of the iconic modernist building were left in “deteriorated” condition.

She showed the camera crew torn rugs, damaged floors, a broken window, a ceiling stained by water leaks, a massive banquet hall left bare of furniture and other issues that would leave normal outgoing tenants nervous over getting their deposits back.

An unknown amount of furniture and artwork from the official residence was missing, damaged or -- in the case of one 19th-century work -- left on the floor, she said.

Electronic equipment was meanwhile left strewn around the library where Bolsonaro used to give his weekly social media live addresses to his farright base.