‘Of course the Prime Minister, if he chooses Minister João Galamba [para discursar no final do debate do Orçamento do Estado]you know this will happen sururu media, you can’t not know”, admits to DN the former Secretary of State for the Presidency of the Council of Ministers of the PS Miguel Prata Roque. However, for the current socialist activist, this is an option for the Prime Minister “it had nothing to do with a tirade or an attempt to harass the President of the Republic”.
In short, at the beginning of this week the Minister of Infrastructure returned to the political spotlight by being the government figure chosen to end the debate in general around the 2024 state budget. The option, which caused some consternation among the chamber’s right-wing benches, came after a year marked by several controversies at TAP, which culminated at the end of April, with an advisor from Galamba causing unrest at the Ministry of Infrastructure and leading to the intervention of the Security Information Service (SIS) to recover a computer belonging to that employee that contained classified information.
With the controversy ongoing, the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, believed that removing Galamba could be a viable option in a government affected by matters investigated in the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry surrounding the airline. João Galamba finally submitted his resignation in early May, but António Costa refused that same day. Marcelo left a warning, admitting a “fundamental disagreement with the Prime Minister” but avoiding “creating institutional conflicts”: “I will have to pay even more attention to the issue of the political and administrative responsibility of those in charge, because until now I thought there was an essential agreement on this issue. It turns out that there is not, that there is a fundamental difference.”
When the issue was resolved, the symbolism of the year marked by Galamba was reignited when the Minister of Infrastructure, amid murmurs from the Chega bench, quoted Marcelo to justify the government’s public accounts choices: “This budget follows the only possible strategy.”
“That very theatrical view that the Prime Minister came up with the best way to irritate the President of the Republic seems to me typical of people who live in a separate world, of political conspiracies and not of the reality that interests the Portuguese”, Miguel Prata Roque claims, but he admits that he notices “Chega’s screams and the laughter in Parliament”. “That was missing, that the Minister of the Republic could not quote the President of the Republic,” he concludes.
“Since the issue of TAP is extremely important, the privatization of TAP, and in particular the strategic issue of centerfor that is what needs to be saved, the center from Lisbon [principal centro de operações da companhia aérea]I think it is normal that the minister responsible for TAP closes the debate”, considers the doctor and former member of the PS National Secretariat Álvaro Beleza, who admits that he is only interested in “programmatic” and “strategic” issues. But TAP was one of the topics missing from Galamba’s speech.
Yet, according to Miguel Prata Roque, Galamba’s presence is justified by the fact that “a government with an absolute majority, after having gone through a year of great political difficulties, must now serve”, and that, for this purpose, the “executive” minister will be responsible for the “construction of the new Lisbon International Airport”, the “investment in the railway” and “a series of future projects for the country that are being implemented, in particular within the framework of the PRR [Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência, constituído por fundos comunitários]. But TAP remained absent from the Minister of Infrastructure’s speech.
Questionable speech
“I was a bit surprised that the Minister of Infrastructure did not make any reference to TAP, while he took into account the importance of this subject”, emphasizes Miguel Prata Roque. “The importance of the issue for me is not the political importance in the sense of partisan chicanery, because often, when the TAP management was attacked, in fact the relationship between the TAP management and the various government offices was attacked. , but not exactly the economic criteria or the criteria for good internal management of the company,” explains the former governor.
Moreover, he notes, “it was a very astonishing speech” while he expected “a sharper speech, from the point of view of verve and rhetoric”.
“Having to read a written speech, having to meditate, having to pass it on to the boss first, having to look at the times when he talked about Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, was not that exciting in the end, not even because of the beauty of the form, not even the the way it came out”José Adelino Maltez, professor of political science at the Higher Institute of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Lisbon (ISCSP), told DN.
For the political scientist, both Galamba’s choice to close the OE2024 debate and the content of the speech “was Costa saying: ‘I still command more than you.’ Therefore, it was a power play for something that most of us do not know, namely what happened in the relations between the Prime Minister and the President of the Republic. “It was a joke, it was on purpose,” he concludes.
Marcelo takes away discomfort
During the week, the President of the Republic stated that he does not feel any discomfort with the speech of the Minister of Infrastructure.
“The inconvenience of an intervention, which is mainly an intervention in the field of infrastructure, is an inconvenience that does not apply to me. It is an inconvenience that could be for anyone who may be close or distant to this subject has had. past. I don’t”Marcelo said, adding that “the government chooses who speaks.”
Hide errors in the budget
With Marcelo left out, Adelino Maltez sees Galamba’s speech and all the options pursued as a government strategy with a purpose. “It was a way of exaggerating the politics so that we would not notice the technical errors of the OE2024,” claims the political scientist, for whom “the budget is a political decision, it is not a technocratic decision of those who understand the circumstances” .
So, the professor of political science continues, it was expected that “it would be the Minister of Finance” to close the OE2024 debate, but under these circumstances “he would have to spare himself from what is the struggle in the specialty, which is not meek.”
In view of all this, Adelino Maltez believes that this is the case ‘We are now commenting on something that is absolutely not interesting. In three months no one will know what happened. It’s a footnote at the bottom of the page, which is absolutely not interesting. Knowing that the Prime Minister’s position is at most to accept some proposals from the PCP, which has noticed an error by the budget designer, and therefore to have a party with that, but the course line is a line with little foresight. Because look at that IUC stuff [Imposto Único de Circulação]which is not interesting from a global perspective, and the chaos it caused, because it is a mistake by the designer,” the political scientist emphasizes.
Giving out guns for nothing
OE2024 “must be a political decision and obey them”, analyzes Adelino Maltez. For the professor of political science ‘she [os governantes] They invented this technique because they thought they were fooling someone. And so there is sloppiness here. There is negligence here that Costa must have been furious about,” he says, recalling that the IUC was highlighted in those terms as something that should not have been included in the OE2024.
Therefore, the political scientist notes, “they had to invent the 25 euros per year and so on, which effectively undoes the measure, while they could say, ‘Look, let’s increase it to 25 euros per year and so on.’ “‘You have to spend your guns on something that should never have appeared. A fire was made on something that was unpredictable. It must have been unpredictable for the Prime Minister to notice that they had invented this. So go ahead and involve Galamba “Because we no longer talk about the budget, we discuss his dispute with the President of the Republic, who has no interest in it at all,” the professor concludes.
But Adelino Maltez says that “we like this, to find a reason for a political scandal”. And from this perspective, the political scientist criticizes: “Galamba did very poorly. Because these supposed numbers two and three [do Governo] sometimes they have evidence of when they reach the Peter Principle [princípio que defende que, na hierarquia de uma instituição, as pessoas serão promovidas até ao limite da sua incompetência]. And he was clearly the one who surpassed the Peter Principle. There is nothing more,” he concludes.
TAP from speech
Motivated by the absence of the airline in the speech of the Minister of Infrastructure, Miguel Prata Roque says that he finds it “strange that the following is not discussed in relation to TAP: that the Portuguese State, which has been committed to the privatization of essential infrastructure for the country – the privatization of the energy distribution and energy trading system, the privatization of Galp, the attempted privatization of Caixa Geral de Depósitos – and I think that from this point of view the issue of TAP is a decisive issue, because TAP is expected to make a profit of around 300 million euros this year. This means that in 10 years, TAP will be able to return the money invested in it in 2021,” he concludes.
Source: DN
