Councilors want Budget, Marcelo insists on understanding, but Pedro Nuno and Ventura maintain positions
Before the meeting, the President of the Republic tried to relieve pressure, saying that today’s councilors’ meeting would not be to discuss the negotiation of the State Budget (OE). “It has nothing directly to do with it”, said Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, in Seixal, in the early afternoon, on the side of the street.inauguration of the Memory Space – CGTP-IN Archive, Documentation and Audiovisual Center.
Marcelo recalled that he had announced this meeting before the summer and that the idea is to “analyze the political, global, European and Portuguese economic situation” to “reflect on the situation in the world”. statement In the end, there is the sentence that says nothing else: “The State Council analyzed the international and national situation.”
The analysis, however, helped several advisors to appeal for national understandings in a scenario of increasing international instability. The interventions followed one another, with more or less internal arrivals. And, at the end of the meeting, despite what he had said before, the President ended up making a speech calling for understanding, which implies concessions on both sides, especially because he made a point of highlighting the obvious that was blaring a couple of days ago, when he said that the AD Government is a “minority” and that the PS “is not a Government”.
If a few days ago the President was “hooked” that the State Budget, you will not have left the meeting with better perspectives. Marcelo does not want to be the first Head of State to dissolve Parliament three times, when he had already been the first to do so following the unprecedented lead of a Budget, in 2021. But with the data released this Tuesday about his table has no elements to swear that everything will go as you wish.
Without former President António Ramalho Eanes present, the meeting began at 5:10 pm and, due to its duration (the statement was released after 9:30 pm), the interventions were long in a group of advisors who were mostly right-wing and in which Pedro Nuno Santos and Carlos César are the only publicly left-wing names.
Photo Ana Baião
Cavaco Silva, who has made successive public interventions, including saying that it would not hurt the world to govern in twelfths, focused not on the Budget but on economic issues, with the underlying idea that the Government needs time to resolve them.
The Presidency of the Republic issued the traditional and dry statement, which in addition to saying that the State Council “analyzed the international and national situation”, expresses solidarity with the victims of the September fires. The State Council “formulated a vote of deep sorrow for the tragic fires that occurred in our countryespecially in the Central and Northern regions”, recalling “respectfully the fatal victims and their families, as well as expressing solidarity with the affected populations and all those who fought the fires”.
Once this Council of State that Marcelo wanted to be more “international” has closed, there will be another, with no date set yet, but already announced, towards the end of the month. After the OE has been delivered to Parliament and the President has received all parties. In other words, with a closer perspective on whether or not the Budget will be approved.
