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Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro praised Angela Merkel for reconsidering the government-ordered shutdowns and restrictive stay-at-home orders.
“I was surprised this week by a statement made by Angela Merkel, who canceled a confinement planned for Easter, made a mea culpa and said it was a mistake,” the Brazilian president said in his weekly social media broadcast.
He praised the decision announced by the German Chancellor this Wednesday that her five-day shutdown was being reversed. The original order would have prohibited parades and would have forced all businesses to shut down.
Bolsonaro assured that “a newspaper wrote that this shows a capacity for reflection and that this would be desirable for other rulers in the world.”
In the same vein, Bolsonaro said that last week he visited a poor neighborhood in Brasilia and heard “very sad stories”, saw “empty refrigerators” and “people forced to stay at home and who now earn nothing or have lost their jobs.”
The president said that “it is a very complicated situation since food is almost over and this is reflected in many communities affected by this ‘stay at home’ policy, which has already thrown many people into misery.”
He also reviewed the measures adopted by the Government to guarantee the provision of medical supplies that are lacking in the hospitals for intubation procedures of seriously ill patients and denied that there is a generalized shortage, as some medical unions have denounced.
“We have sought the necessary supplies and we hope that they are now sufficient. There is a very big race for those supplies and we hope to have the necessary ones.”
