With President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva traveling to Asia, the new minister of the General Secretariat of the Presidency, Guilherme Boulos, has been using his first days in office, before his inauguration scheduled for Wednesday, for internal meetings with the team.
PSOL’s main name, the new minister has also been giving priority to topics such as the debate on new legislation for application workers.
Boulos said he received the mission from the president to tour the country’s 26 states to “put the government on the streets”. The plan is related to Lula’s re-election project in 2026.
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On Tuesday, the new minister met with his colleague from the Secretariat of Social Communication (Secom), Sidônio Palmeira. The expectation is that it will be used as a government weapon on social media.
The former leader of the Homeless Workers Movement (MTST) is the minister with the most followers on Instagram (2.7 million) among all portfolio holders. The Minister of Finance, Fernando Haddad, is second, with 2.5 million.
On the same day, Boulos also met with his predecessor, Márcio Macêdo, and the ministry’s secretaries. There was no sign of a change in the team, but the expectation in the department is that this will happen.
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Boulos posted his first video on social media on Wednesday from inside his office on the fourth floor of Palácio do Planalto. In the message, he showed Praça dos Três Poderes and repeated that he received from the president the mission of listening to popular demands.
On the same day, the new minister received a visit to his office from his wife, Natália Szermeta, who also recorded images of her husband’s new room on social media.
Boulos appointed his fellow MTST member, Josué Rocha, who coordinated his campaigns for mayor of São Paulo in 2020 and 2024, to organize the transition with Macêdo’s team.
One of the missions received from Boulos is to dialogue with application workers to try to regulate the activity, one of the PT member’s campaign promises in 2022 and so far unfulfilled.
The ideas of the new minister of the General Secretariat of the Presidency to regulate work via app follow the same line as the project sent in March last year by the Ministry of Labor to Congress and which was not met with resistance from parliamentarians and the category itself. Sending the text caused a crisis in the government at the time.
In an interview with GloboNews on Wednesday, Boulos defended the need to establish a pension and insurance plan for workers and the payment of a minimum amount per hour of work. The two proposals were included in the PL, which was not implemented and only covered drivers and not delivery people.
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The new minister also spoke in the interview about the need to provide transparency so that workers understand how the algorithms that manage them work. Boulos also committed to dialogue with the workers. At the time of sending the PL from the Ministry of Labor, one of the main criticisms was that the text did not have the approval of app drivers.
