The unimaginable happened: António Costa chose to close the parliamentary debate in general OE2024 this Tuesday, the minister whom the President of the Republic believes since last May is the best in the government: João Galamba, Minister of Infrastructure, one of the government officials who oversee TAP (and who are therefore co-authors of the company’s reprivatization decree that Marcelo vetoed a few days ago and returned to the government, with the insistent accusation of a lack of transparency in the process).
“Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to quote your Excellency, the President of the Republic: this budget follows the only possible strategy.”
And not only was this unimaginable choice made, but João Galamba himself later decorated it with bad refinements by quoting the President of the Republic himself in defense of the government’s budget proposal: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to quote your Excellency , the President of Republic: This budget follows the only possible strategy,” he stated. He then added “with the consent of the president” that “it is really a good budget” – a sentence he was only able to complete on the third attempt, after several interruptions caused by protests from deputies, especially Chega.
According to Pedro Nuno Santos’ successor in Infrastructure, “in contrast to the opposition, which shoots everywhere” and “promises everything to everyone”, this is “a responsible but ambitious budget, which meets the needs of families, companies, the present and the future. needs of the country”. In other words: “a budget to improve revenues and reduce taxes, a budget for works, investments and planning”, an OE “that the country needs” because “it increases revenues, promotes investments and guarantees the future”.
Before Galamba, the PS parliamentary leader, Eurico Brilhante Dias, had interpreted OE2024 as a sign of a new cycle: “If initially our concern was: employment, employment, employment, then our concern at this stage must be: yield , yield. , yield.”
The deputy would also fire a barb that could be interpreted as aimed at Marcelo – but also at the PSD. After considering that this OE was being “rebuilt” “in a context of enormous uncertainty” (“the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, but also the high interest rates in the Eurozone and the economic slowdown that has already occurred in Europe”), he concluded: “In light of these geopolitical tensions, political actors cannot be, or at least should not be, adding uncertainty to uncertainty.”
The general debate on OE2024 ended on Tuesday at 7:20 PM in the House of Representatives with the more than expected result: the PS majority voted in favor and approved it. The other parties voted against, with the (usual) exception of the only deputies from PAN (Inês Sousa Real) and Livre (Rui Tavares), who abstained, in the name of the Socialists’ availability for negotiations in this area.
“It is miserable that such a party calls itself left-wing, because in fact it embraces all flags of the right.”
The history of the debate also included perhaps the most severe attack by the Left Bloc on the government since the end of the ‘apparatus’.
Pedro Filipe Soares, leader of the bloc group, said it was “miserable” that the socialist majority “embraces all the flags of the right”. Saying that Costa prefers, in order to “save the big economic groups, the banks and their profits of millions of dollars”, to make young people pay to study, the bloc delegate could hardly have been more aggressive: “It It is miserable that a party like that claims to be left-wing, because in fact it embraces all flags of the right.”
In the meantime, he directly attacked the legitimacy of the government to now proceed with the reprivatization of TAP, as this had not been announced in the government programme. It is “without legitimacy” and “has no mandate”, he stressed, saying that Costa now wants “to privatize most of the capital against the António Costa of 2014”.
On the right, Miranda Sarmento, head of the PSD bank, concluded his party’s interventions by saying that a “cyclical and non-structural fiscal consolidation cannot be called correct accounts”. Before the opening, I had qualified the intervention of the previous speaker, André Ventura, from Chega, as “a nice break from stand up comedy“.
Source: DN
