Nobody is looking good in the tortuous political process that has been developing in Portugal for a few months. At first, the matter seems to be limited to the negotiations for the approval of the State Budget for 2025 drawn up by the Government led by Luís Montenegro (center-right) and which lacks a parliamentary majority. The outcome, however, goes further and will determine the political future of the country because one of its possible outcomes is the calling of new elections. They would be the third in three years. An unusual instability that has no precedent since the first legislative elections were held in 1976 after the Carnation Revolution that occurred two years earlier.
For different reasons, the current tug-of-war is wearing down the image of top leaders. The figure of Luís Montenegro as prime minister, which has been consolidated since he came to power, has suffered a blow with the revelations made by the leader of the far-right Chega party, André Ventura. In an interview on TVI/CNN, Ventura stated that they had a secret meeting on July 13 at the official residence of São Bento where the budget negotiation and a hypothetical entry into Chega’s Government were discussed “when the conditions were met.” An offer denied almost immediately by the prime minister, who wrote on the social network X: “The Government has never proposed an agreement to Chega. What the president of that party has said is simply a LIE. It is serious although it is nothing more than a lie and desperation.”
The Government never proposed an agreement to Chega.
Or that the President of his party has just been told that he is simply a LIE.
It is serious but it does not pass from Lie to Despair.— Luís Montenegro (@LMontenegropm) October 10, 2024
Added to Ventura’s statement is that of Diogo Pacheco de Amorim, vice president of the Assembly of the Republic and prominent leader of Chega, who this Saturday assured EL PAÍS that Ventura and Montenegro met on five occasions and only one of them met. made public. According to his version, the prime minister asked them to support the 2025 Budget, while Ventura demanded a stable agreement for the entire legislature. “In one of the meetings they even asked Ventura to leave through the back door, something he refused,” said Pacheco, who assures that his party has evidence to prove the unknown encounters. This same version was disclosed on the Now channel by André Ventura, who assured that the first meeting was held in May. Luís Montenegro refused to comment on these meetings. “I already said everything I had to say,” he declared.
These quotes clash with the public discourse of the Government, which has always opted for the Socialist Party (PS), the main opposition party, as the preferred partner to agree on the Budgets. The prime minister, in addition, vigorously defended his “no means no” to the entry of the extreme right into his Cabinet despite the fact that this veto complicated his life in Parliament, where there is a clear majority of the right (138 deputies among Democratic Alliance, Chega and Liberal Initiative) against the left (92 of the PS, Bloco de Esquerda, Communist Party, Livre and PAN).
Relations between Montenegro and Ventura are full of disagreements. In his last interview on the SIC network, the prime minister disqualified him as “a weather vane” for his frequent changes of position regarding the State Budget. This contradictory image may be one of the factors that is causing Chega’s electoral expectations to deflate and could make it difficult for them to retain the 50 deputies they have right now in new elections. In the populist caucus there is not much interest in going to the polls in this context.
But it is the Socialist Party that is receiving the greatest pressure, both political and media, to allow the Government Budget to go ahead, after having managed to mitigate the tax reform proposed by Montenegro. The reduction in corporate tax will be less than intended and the new Youth Personal Income Tax has been designed with progressive criteria, as the socialists demanded. With this, the prime minister closed the negotiation of the budget project and refused to make any more concessions.
After the entry of the project in the Assembly of the Republic, the most centrist sector of the PS is in favor of giving it the green light and allowing the legislature to advance. An opinion that is not shared by the most left wing. The secretary general, Pedro Nuno Santos, has said that “there is time” until the parliamentary vote, at the end of October, to reveal the meaning of his vote.
Everyone assumes that if the Government does not obtain support to overcome the vote, early elections will be called, although no one in the opposition wants them because they foresee bad results. On the contrary, the Cabinet of Montenegro, which could continue governing with the extended Budgets, is leaning towards early elections, convinced that they will benefit at the polls and that they will break the tie that they currently have with the Socialist Party, which only counts with two fewer deputies than the governing coalition, the Democratic Alliance.
The opposition reproaches Montenegro for having been in an electoral campaign since it arrived with its concessions to the groups that had been demanding better salaries for years. The governor of the Bank of Portugal, Mário Centeno, has already warned that the country is experiencing the greatest growth in current public spending since 1992. “We have already had enough problems in the past to know what it means,” he declared days ago.
On the other hand, the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who in the fall of 2021 decided to call early elections because the opposition did not approve the State Budget presented by the socialist Prime Minister António Costa, is now reluctant to repeat the decision. If he dissolves the Assembly of the Republic, he will become the head of state of the democratic stage that has called the most early elections. In addition to doing so in 2021, he dissolved the Chamber again at the end of 2023 after Costa’s resignation due to the judicial operation that affected his chief of staff, Vítor Escária, and one of his best friends, Diogo Lacerda Machado. The plot designed by the Prosecutor’s Office was not shared by the judges, who have deflated the corruption case and limited it to possible influence peddling. Rebelo de Sousa rejected the option of appointing another socialist prime minister and preferred that the polls decide the future.