What did the President of the Republic want when he took advantage of his speech on Wednesday, October 5 to explicitly recall that he “has the power to dissolve parliament”.
Marcelo made the statement that contextualized it with the powers that presidents had a hundred years ago, at the time of the 1st Republic. And he did that to point out that, unlike what happened then, the president now has this power, as well as the power to “veto laws,” and this is all based on the legitimacy of exercising a position for which he was “directly” elected by “millions of people” (which also did not happen to the presidents of the 1st Republic).
In other words, it was trying to get the message across that the president, with his electoral legitimacy and his powers to control governance, is part of a regime much better prepared today than the regime of a hundred years ago to deal with authoritarian deviations. to face. “What I meant was: have no fear, because what happened to the First Republic, which ended in a dictatorship, will not happen,” he would later explain to journalists.
Political scientist António Costa Pinto and commentator Pedro Marques Lopes, heard by the DN, in fact refuse to see in the words of the President of the Republic a threat and/or warning to the Prime Minister in the short or medium term.
“It had nothing to do with the present moment,” says Marques Lopes. According to him, “Marcelo was concerned about the confirmation of his powers as a way to ensure the quality of democracy and the stability of the institutions”. Therefore, he said, it would be “misguided” to interpret the words as if they were already addressed to the prime minister – even if, as was the case, the “present moment” shows a government getting involved in successive internal messes without the opposition to move a finger.
António Costa Pinto, a political scientist, also believed that Marcelo’s words “should not lead to immediate reading” – that is, should be interpreted as a short- or medium-term warning to the prime minister.
What the president did was, according to the political scientist – a regular presence in television commentary – “praising the virtues of the Portuguese political regime’s semi-presidentialism”, underscoring precisely his role in “guarding a majority government”.
Moreover, he adds, this semi-presidential character of the current regime was built by its “founders” precisely taking into account the lessons learned from the mistakes of the 1st Republic – a regime so agitated that it country brought strong social support to the dictatorship that emerged on May 28, 1926 (and lasted nearly 50 years, until April 25, 1974).
“There has been no alternative in the history of democracy in Portugal. What there has been is a change and a lackluster change. It is enough to see that the PS has ruled 20 of the last 27 years.”
Moreover, immediately after Marcelo’s speech, the day before yesterday, at Praça do Município, in Lisbon, the parties that made comments about him ignored the question of the dissolution of Parliament.
Luís Montenegro saw in the presidential intervention “a strong appeal”: “To those who govern, to adopt a transformative, reform-oriented policy that can solve the problems that the Portuguese face on a daily basis; to the opposition, for taking on of responsibility for demand, control, oversight and the creation of alternatives”.
BE emphasized that the speech was not missing a word about “impoverishment” and IL criticized Marcelo for misperceiving the existence of “alternatives” available to voters: “There has been no alternative in the history of democracy in Portugal. an alternation and a faint alternation. It is enough to see that the PS has ruled 20 of the past 27 years,” said the Liberal Parliament leader Rodrigo Saraiva.
Source: DN
