PS, PSD, PCP, BE, PAN and Livre this Thursday rejected all amendments to the preamble of the constitution proposed by Chega and IL, with discussion focusing on its potential legal value.
During the meeting of the occasional committee for constitutional revision this Thursday, the article-by-article discussion of the bills amending the fundamental law began, with only the preamble being discussed.
The Liberal Initiative and Chega are the only two parties that intend to amend the preamble to the Constitution and delete the reference to opening a way “towards a socialist society”.
Chega also wants to delete “references to the fascist period”, while the liberals want to add a new one to the already voiced reference to the April 25 revolution: “On November 25, 1975, Portugal consolidated as a full-fledged democratic regime, preventing the establishment of a communist regime”.
“We must conclude that the preamble is only a historical object or that it has normative value (…) It is wrong to say that it is not [valor normativo]said André Ventura, referring to Constitutional Court (TC) rulings from the 1980s that rely on the preamble to make case law.
The Chega leader justified the proposal with the aim of materializing “the ideological neutrality” of the Republic’s constitution, which “should not exclude political areas”.
The former president of the Liberal Initiative also defended that the preamble “to the extreme” always has “interpretive influence on constitutional decisions”.
“I want to pay all respects to the preamble to the Constitution, precisely because I do not consider it merely a historical piece,” emphasizes João Cotrim Figueiredo.
Faced with the announced “lead” of the amendments, Cotrim Figueiredo said that the parliament should at least define that the preamble cannot serve as a basis for future decisions of the TC, since without this reservation there is a risk for the future.
For the PS, Pedro Delgado Alves considered that “the matter has been resolved in terms of the legal value of the preamble”, saying that “no one currently assigns normative value to it” and stressed that since the 1980s the TC has never considered it as a argument.
“It has no interpretive value, it reflects the moment of its adoption, April 2, 1976 (…) It is not a text in which it makes sense to open historical rifts, let’s keep the preamble alone,” defended the ‘ vice’ of the socialist bank.
PSD deputy André Coelho Lima also believed that “this is an outdated document” and warned that if it had normative value, “the discussion would be different”.
“The preamble is a preface, it is the note of the authors on the date of its elaboration, to change the meaning of the preface is to take away its own meaning (…) normatively the non-victories of the PS would be unconstitutional,” he ironized.
PCP deputy Alma Rivera again found the discussion heated, only with the novelty that it was not conducted by the CDS, but by IL and Chega, but she stressed that, if “it has no normative value, it is not just historical” . and “contributes to a reading of the Constitution”.
“Chega and IL want to rewrite history by attributing to the Constituent Assembly of ’76 a text they wrote 50 years later (…) There is always revenge and reckoning with the Constitution,” he criticized, in a intervention that Cotrim Figueiredo considered offensive.
PCP, like PS, BE and PAN, criticized Chega’s intention to remove the reference to the “fascist regime” from the preamble, with bloquista parliament leader Pedro Filipe Soares declaring “complete opposition” to any change.
“It is absolutely undeniable that it has historical value, but it is contradictory that it is based on that historical value. It is not neutral, either with regard to history or with regard to the current situation,” he defended.
The only deputy of the PAN, Inês Sousa Real, considered that this original text of the constitution has no legal force, while Rui Tavares, the only representative of Livre, defended that the historical value of the preamble “only gives value to it” .
“The preamble is a crystallized narrative that takes us into the future at some point and intends to set boundaries for the future regime,” he said, sparking widespread laughter when he hypothesized that a child would have an April 2 constitution. to get. in school today from ’76 that talked about liberal democracy.
Source: DN
