After the debate and the approval of the state budget for 2023, which ends on Friday, the parliament leaves for another marathon, that of the debate on the constitutional revision. The PSD wants to give full throttle to this process, to try to mark the political field “with a project to transform Portuguese society”, as the party’s secretary general, Hugo Soares, says. And to show the importance that the Social Democrats attach to it, one of the deputies to be part of the constitutional revision committee will be parliamentary leader Joaquim Miranda Sarmento.
“Our project is not an ethereal thing, it has to do with people’s concrete lives and on which the PS will have to express itself,” says DN Hugo Soares, who was in charge of coordinating this file under the party leadership. The former Social Democratic parliamentary leader insists that in the “public discussion” of the ideas that govern the projects, the PSD will fight for “all proposals”, but admits that some of them are more expressive of the positions that the party wants implemented in this constitutional review process.
The process was initiated by Chega, but for any proposal to change the fundamental law to be successful, two-thirds of the deputies are needed, which translates into the need for the PS and PSD to understand each other.
There are already points where the projects of the PSD, which includes 40 constitutional amendments, and the more minimalist PS converge: in the initiation of compulsory pre-school education, as well as secondary education (now only primary school is enshrined in the Constitution); in a single mandate for the President of the Republic of seven years (instead of two out of five); the consecration of the possibility of a state of emergency, specifically and for public health reasons (with the possibility of confinement and hospitalization of infected people); and the permission for access by security services to information, metadata, by judicial decision and control.
But the PSD will also push for the defense of electronic voting and from the age of 16 (today at 18) – which the socialists have already publicly rejected. “There are a set of rights that should not be exercised until the age of 18 and so it makes sense that since this is the beginning of the majority and the full exercise of highly relevant decisions in one’s life, that participation in the life of the community is done,” said the vice president of the socialist group Pedro Delgado Alves.
But among their proposals, the Social Democrats will also confront the PS with the initiation in the constitution of a new paradigm of the national health service, reconciling the public service with the private and social sector.
The creation of a Council for Territorial and Intergenerational Cohesion is another proposal in the PSD constitutional revision project that the party will be fighting for. “We all know that there are depopulated areas where parliamentary representation is lost and that is not admissible,” assures the social-democratic secretary-general. Hugo Soares reiterates that the PS will have to face the options it wants to take in this constitutional revision.
Source: DN
