“We will have to start the Government knowing that we must withdraw almost 8,000 military personnel in positions of people not submitted to competitions,” Lula said during an event by the Brazilian Labor Union (CUT, in Portuguese) in Sao Paulo state on Monday.

In late March, while he was participating in another event at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, Lula, who founded the Workers’ Party (PT), pointed out that the “role of the military personnel is not to pull in the bag of (Jair, president) Bolsonaro or Lula.”

According to a survey by the Federal Audit Court, 2,765 military personnel were reported in civilian positions in the federal Executive in 2018, during the last year of the Michel Temer Government.

Such figure rose to 3,515 in 2019, during the first year of Bolsonaro’s administration, and reached 6,157 in July 2020, an increase of 122 percent over the previous period.

Also in his Monday speech, Lula warned that the electoral campaign will be complicated and asked not to be carried away by optimism.

The PT currently has 56 federal legislators and seven senators, and defends its efforts to increase its lawmakers in Congress.

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