The president of the republic announced on Tuesday that he will ask parliament to reconsider the law on the incompatibilities and impediments of political office holders, in an effort to “define a regime that allays the fears of Portuguese society”.
When asked by journalists, in the gardens of the Palácio de Belém, in Lisbon, whether he would appeal this matter to the Constitutional Court, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa replied that he intends to do something “more important than that”. namely “addressing a message to the Assembly of the Republic requesting that it reconsider this matter”.
The head of state said he will do so “within a few days”, requesting that the law in force from 2019 be reconsidered and that “where to put in place a regime that alleviates the fear of Portuguese society” with possible situations of “nepotism or excessive customer relationships”.
According to the president of the republic, there was already “with other governments, even of the opposite sign”, but “with the latest governments there is a lot” of a feeling of “doubt” on this issue in “at least one part of society”.
“If what has been approved in 2019 is considered insufficient, I think that there, either on the initiative of the government or on the initiative of the parliament, but the final decision is made by the parliament, then consideration should be given to adopting a new law,” said Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
In his opinion, the current law, which he has enacted, “does not restrict the participation of relatives or relatives of guardians at all levels in an unacceptable or inadmissible or inconceivable way”.
What now needs to be reconsidered “isn’t just the degree of kinship, it’s the degree of relationship between public bodies”, for example if, in view of incompatibilities, “different ministries of the same government” are to be treated “as if they were one” , orphan.
The head of state, on the other hand, mentioned as a factor to be taken into account that the public administration “has a brutal scope to intervene” in the lives of the Portuguese, not only “through subsidies, through recruitment”, but also “through benefits, by benefits, by exemptions”.
“We are not in a presidential system, it has to be the parliament to make the fine-tuning and say: we extend more, we extend less, how far,” he defended.
Source: DN
