Iniciativa Liberal attempts to force health chiefs to face MPs, in spite of PS block
The government’s last ‘day at the helm’ in any meaningful way has been a fairly grim one. The focus is still on who may have pulled which strings and when four years ago when the Portuguese national health system agreed to treat twins living in Brazil with the most expensive medication in the world…
President Marcelo’s attempt to ‘set the record straight’ on Monday appears to have opened the floodgates on ‘righteous indignation’.
The upshot of events so far today has been that PS Socialists banded together to block calls for the former minister of health Marta Temido, and her then secretary of State António Lacerda Sales, to answer MPs questions in parliament (the reason being they were the politicians in place at the time of the twins’ treatment).
Instead, PS Socialists decided that the current health minister (Manuel Pizaarro) and the president of Santa Maria’s board of directors, Ana Paula Martins, should be the ones to address the parliamentary health commission.
The plan looked like it hadn’t quite gone their way, however: Initiativa Liberal – the country’s 4th most represented party in parliament – attempted to use what has been described as “its potestative right” to call people opposition MPs actually want to hear – and they were immediately pilloried for doing so.
Luís Soares, PS coordinator of the parliamentary health commission, has said IL is hiding its (true) “justicialist intentions”, and, in his view, does “not want to clarify this case” at all.
This is an odd argument, in that IL’s leader Rui Rocha explained succinctly that the reason for using the potestative right lies in his interpretation of PS reluctance to allow the questioning of Ms Temido and Mr Lacerda Sales as “further evidence” that the party is “going to block what is the discovery of the truth to the end”, which is “frankly unacceptable”.
In between all this unpleasantness, journalists have approached the president for ‘further comment’, but he has said that he ‘said everything that he had to say on the matter’ four days ago.
The problem with this controversy dragging on is that discrepancies in people’s truths have started emerging – to the extent that António Lacerda Sales has now played the “I cannot remember” card over whether or not he booked the twins’ appointment at Santa Maria Hospital in 2019, after initially saying he most definitely hadn’t.
As commentators have admitted, this story is getting more and more ‘unacceptable’, and tempers on every side of the deeply-divided ‘House’ (parliament) are rising.
Today’s ‘pressing business’ in the meantime is a vote on something that could cause “a revolution in schools”, writes Correio da Manhã. Outgoing Socialists are intent on pushing through the right for school pupils to ‘determine their identity and gender’. It will mean that if Manuel decides he wants to be known as Marta/ Maria, or any other female name, he must be given the right to use the girls’ lavatories. Schools must respect children’s rights to come to school dressed according to the gender they identify with, “even in establishments where there is the obligation to wear a uniform”.
As for the day’s final Council of Ministers, it has approved the plan for a high-speed rail link between Lisbon and Porto, and signed off on the project that obliges ANA airports authority to move forwards with much-needed improvements at Lisbon’s struggling Humberto Delgado airport.
The other ‘major projects’ of this administration – particularly the sale of airline TAP and the decision on the location of the new Lisbon airport – have all been deferred to whatever government emerges from elections on March 10.
And by the end of the day, it becane clear that IL’s ‘potestative request’ was not going to work: the small print explains this kind of request can only be used on sitting members of government, which Marta Temido and António Lacerda Sales no longer are. In other words, PS Socialists have ensured that the politicians in power at the time of the twins’ treatment cannot be questioned in parliament, as a matter of public record. ND
Source material: SIC Notícias/ Correio da Manhã
