Marcelo Rebelo da Silva says he has no regrets about inviting Brazilian President Lula da Silva to speak at the Portuguese parliament on April 25.
I haven’t regretted anything. The Portuguese position is clear: Russia invaded Ukraine, not Ukraine invaded Russia. Portugal and the EU support Ukraine and we will continue. I will tell President Lula and the President of India, who will follow, and the Presidents of Senegal and Algeria, who will also come to Portugal. The Brazilian position in the UN is stubborn. With Bolsonaro he condemned the invasion several times and with the new Brazilian president he asked for the withdrawal of Russian troops, which has not happened with other Portuguese-speaking countries, which have always abstained. if Brazil changes its position from the one it had, that’s a decision for Brazil, we don’t agree with it, but we have nothing to do with it. Every country has its foreign policy, if we better agree, but if we disagree, we just disagree. If we break off relations with countries that are not in line with our internal and external policies, we would not have relations with 3/4 of the world,” the president of the republic told journalists, recalling that Brazil is precisely the “first country was to be decolonised”.
As for the parties’ criticism of the position, Marcelo says that “this is democracy”. “Each party has the right to oppose. Another thing is the relationship between states,” he stressed.
The presence in parliament of the President of Brazil – who is visiting Portugal between April 22 and 25 – has been shrouded in controversy since Foreign Minister João Gomes Cravinho spoke explicitly in February in a speech by Lula da Silva at the session of the April revolution in the Assembly of the Republic, which marked the unprecedented character, which the opposition of PSD, IL and Chega deserved.
The parliament eventually decided that, instead of an intervention by the President of Brazil at the solemn annual memorial meeting, it would hold a separate welcome session on the same day during Lula da Silva’s state visit to Portugal.
On Saturday, at the end of a visit to China, Brazil’s president defended that “the United States should stop encouraging war” in Ukraine and that “the European Union should start talking about peace”.
In this way, he explained to journalists, the international community will be able to “convince” the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, that “peace is in the interest of the whole world.”
“Patience is needed” to talk to Putin and Zelensky, he said. “But above all, we have to convince the countries that supply weapons, that encourage war, to stop,” he added.
Source: DN
