Economic and Social Council president Francisco Assis on Thursday said there was “no reason” to believe the country would enter an “extremely deep crisis”, insisting that a climate of institutional tensions is not new. would be in democracy.
“At the moment, I don’t think there is any reason to think that the country will enter a very deep crisis from this or that point of view.said Francisco Assis, speaking to journalists at the end of the conference “New Forms of Democratic Participation” organized by the Economic and Social Council (CES) and which took place at the Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva Foundation in Lisbon.
The former MP and parliamentary leader of the PS defended that in democracy “discussion and conflict are part of everyday life”, although he believed that “it is desirable that there is institutional cooperation and good dialogue”, but noted that “there are always moments of tension”.
“A climate of institutional cooperation [entre o Presidente e o primeiro-ministro] it’s okay, the loss of a good institutional dialogue was not very positive news. But at the same time I try to play it down because when that happens, it’s part of democratic life: it happened in the past and our democracy has completely survived.”he underlined.
Francisco Assis stressed that “there have always been moments of tension in the past” and “will continue to be so in the future”.
“I think sometimes we let circumstances dominate us. We need to project ourselves into a broader horizon, because that’s what matters for the country right now,” he said.
The president of the CES referred that “the government must rule, resist the opposition and build itself up as an alternative, and the president has the powers conferred on him by the Constitution, which are not dependent on any eternal powers”.
“Therefore, from that point of view, there is nothing new. The rest is day by day and we follow it,” he stressed.
António José Seguro’s former opponent in the 2011 Socialist leadership race said he was “not at all concerned that a moment of greater tension, of greater conflict could jeopardize the very foundations” of the Portuguese democratic regime, despite admitting that “may affect the majority, the government and the president of the republic”.
“With regard to the institutions, I have the utmost optimism, with regard to the future of the respective holders, at the moment I do not want to comment on the subject and I think that no one should dare to do too much futurology,” he said . .
When asked if he does not believe that the succession of events that have affected the government and the threat of an eventual dissolution of parliament could affect the stability of the government, Francisco Assis replied that this stability is “in doubt every day drawn”.
“In a democracy, there is no absolute stability. It is necessary to know how to manage situations well,” he stressed.
Earlier, in the closing session of the conference, the CES president had maintained that “husband and wife are ‘critical animals’, living in permanent crisis.”
“What is the difference between democracy and other regimes? It is that we, in democracy, make visible the dimension of the crisis and openly discuss the crisis. Other regimes try to silence their crises,” he underlined.
In his intervention, which lasted more than 25 minutes, Francisco Assis also lamented that in contemporary political societies we are witnessing a “disqualification of the debate” and a “tendency to the theatrical gesture”.
“There is a certain tendency to oversimplification, to bombastic phrases, (…) there is a certain negation of thought. (…) It is necessary to nuance the political debate,” he emphasized.
Source: DN
