PSD announces it too will confirm diploma vetoed by President Marcelo
President Marcelo’s veto last week of the diploma restoring the parish council map to the way it was before Portugal’s €79 billion bailout looks as if it was simply a blip in a process that will prevail, no matter what the expense.
PSD parliamentary leader Hugo Soares has announced that the party (holding the fragile reins of minority government) will confirm its support for the disaggregation of parishes sent back to parliament last week – justifying the decision with ‘expectations already created among the population’.
This announcement gels with the intentions of almost all the other parties, albeit Soares said in a statement that he did believe the message given to parliament by the president should be listened to.
To be fair, changing its vote at this stage would only have reflected badly on the PSD, which needs to keep the faith of the electorate.
One of the reasons for Marcelo’s veto lies in the fact that municipal elections are only months away, and he doubts that there is time to restore the 135 parish councils ‘absorbed’ in a cost-cutting exercise by the troika of bailout lenders (European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund).
According to the Constitution of the Republic, in the event of a presidential veto, parliament can confirm the text of the vetoed diploma by an absolute majority of MPs in office – 116 out of 230 in this case. The President is then bound to promulgate the diploma within eight days of its receipt.
To make this majority of 116, the PSD’s votes will be decisive, since CHEGA abstained on the decree appealing to the President of the Republic for a veto, and Iniciativa Liberal voted against (and will be maintaining that stance).
