The President of the Republic said on Wednesday that he is optimistic that by the end of his term of office the foundation stone of Lisbon’s new airport, the construction of which has been planned for more than fifty years, will be laid.
“For the first time I feel that there is reason to be optimistic, now I cannot qualify the optimism (…), but I just want to say that today I am optimistic because I feared reaching the end of the term without even starting, when I saw the first stone of the airport,” said Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa in Albufeira.
The Independent Technical Commission (CTI) will have to submit the report to the government before December 31 with the conclusions of its work, indicating the best solution for the future airport in the Lisbon region.
Speaking at the closing session of the conference “Tourism factor of national cohesion”, the President of the Republic said that he “now began to believe in seeing some stones at the airport (…) based on what we will know at the end of the year”.
According to the head of state, the construction of the new airport is “a recurring theme” that the president of the Portuguese Tourist Confederation has “been struggling with for years at a truly frightening pace”.
“It’s not his fault, strictly speaking it’s the fault of the objective circumstances and it’s not worth taking responsibility now because I think they are collective,” he noted.
For the President of the Republic “it is very Portuguese to define an orientation and then re-examine it in the next political cycle and then see, with great admiration, that the one who defined the orientation no longer has the same orientation , which baffled those who did not know which orientation to have if the previous one were to be maintained and replaced by another.
After this, he added, “it is discovered that there is a law which makes the first solution impossible and definitively paralyzes it. At last the law which would mean the end of the world is promulgated without woe and without any comment.”
“I expected that the moment I announced it, I said: well, this is going to be a national echo, no one noticed. It came across as the most tasteless, odorless and colorless reality you can imagine,” emphasized he.
For Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, “after finding the solution that political systems find when they do not want to be responsible for decisions, namely to put technicians in charge of making political decisions, (…) it is to be expected that technicians will not become politicians and not have the existential fears that politicians wanted to avoid by handing the matter over to technicians.”
“There is not much time left either because there are only three months left,” he emphasized.
However, he said that he still has doubts: “which of us will still be alive when the whole process is completed (…) because it entails changes in other realities, from airports to the army and others in Portuguese society “.
Source: DN
