What had been presented by President Lula da Silva as a speech at the solemn parliamentary session commemorating April 25, became an autonomous moment: a “ceremonial welcome session” at the Assembly of the Republic (AR) for Brazil’s head of state.
Yesterday it was up to the president of the AR, the socialist Augusto Santos Silva, to give voice to the withdrawal of the initial promise made by the Portuguese Foreign Minister, João Gomes Cravinho, about a week ago in Brasília at a joint press conference with his Brazilian counterpart Mauro Vieira: “It is the first time that a foreign head of state has given a speech on that date.”
In fact, the President of the Republic was the first to speak of Lula’s arrival in Portugal on the occasion of the celebration of the Carnation Revolution. Marcelo did so last December in Brasilia, on the eve of participating in Lula’s inauguration: “A meeting is already planned in Portugal, from April 22 to 25, with the summit between President Lula and the Portuguese Prime Minister and the state visit at my invitation, culminating in participation in the April 25 ceremony”. He also said he would take the opportunity to present Chico Buarque with the 2019 Camões Prize in Lisbon (which was not awarded because then-President Bolsonaro refused to subscribe to it). Yesterday at the leaders’ conference, Augusto Santos Silva introduced: “We will have the great pleasure of hosting the President of the Federative Republic of Brazil, a sister country, in a solemn welcoming session, which will be specially dedicated to him.”
However, this session, which could even take place on the same day, April 25, is separate from the traditional formal session with which the parties mark the revolution. “In light of the Rules of Procedure of the AR, we have formal welcome sessions for heads of state, and it is this figure that we will use to receive President Lula da Silva here, and we have other sessions, including the solemn session to commemorate of April 25,” explains Santos Silva. The idea gained wide consensus, except for Chega. “Now, in terms of organization, logistics, protocol conditions, that’s my job and we still have more than a month and a half ahead of us,” concluded the president of AR – who also recalled that “the good, beautiful Portuguese tradition, is that there no state visit is without a visit to the Portuguese Parliament”.
Marcelo, faced with Parliament’s decisions, ruled out that the change in plans could cause problems in relations between the two countries, because with Brazil “the political and diplomatic relations are very sweet, I mean it’s the superlative of sweet, they are very, very, very sweet and very good.”
António Costa, for his part, added that relations were “little intense” in Bolsonaro’s time, and that it is now imperative to relaunch them “as soon as possible”. According to him, it was Lula who proposed to hold the first Luso-Brazilian summit of this new phase on April 22, the day when 1500 Portuguese navigators led by Pedro Álvares Cabral arrived in Brazil.
Source: DN
