Right-wing party enrages by hanging provocative posters out of parliamentary windows
The final day of voting on the 2025 State Budget was thrown into “chaos” today (the words of news broadcasters) after right-wing party CHEGA hung provocative posters out of parliamentary windows.
The posters – decrying what the party sees as the ‘shame’ of the country’s government’s decision to end the 5% cut on politicians’ salaries, imposed during the Troika years – were described by speaker José Pedro Aguiar Branco as “political vandalism”.
This was, certainly in the government’s eyes, another moment where CHEGA took advantage of a decision to blow it out of all context. The decision has nothing to do with increasing MPs’ salaries, parliamentary leader Hugo Soares told the House yesterday. It is simply removing a measure that dates back a decade…
But CHEGA’s ploy to irritate worked marvellously: the left particularly flew into a froth of indignation, calling on parliamentary business to be suspended.
There then followed (against a backdrop of molten fury and recriminations beamed over morning news bulletins) a vote. Did MPs want the day’s schedule to be interrupted, or not, asked the speaker.
At this point, CHEGA decided to vote with the government, and business has therefore continued: chaos has been bundled back into the drawer for another day/ later today perhaps. Firefighters called in to remove the offending posters have, in the meantime, concluded this job.
The parliamentary façade has returned to normal – but the sensation that Portugal’s political situation is ‘back in the swamp’ pervades. These are not normal times.
For now, the final voting on Portugal’s ‘mortally wounded’ State budget continues.
As for the damage inflicted yesterday by a Socialist proposal to increase the lowest pensions by more than envisaged, former PSD finance minister Manuela Ferreira Leite has said it was completely irresponsible: “Any responsible government would not have conditions, even does not have conditions, to take a decision like this without great risks. I have no doubt that no Socialist minister of the likes of Mário Centeno (now the governor of the Bank of Portugal) or Fernando Medina (the former finance minister under PS Socialists) would have taken a decision like this”, she told SIC Notícias.
Yet, the new Socialist group under Pedro Nuno Santos has, and with the support of the left, has managed to throw the government’s painstaking accounting into disarray.
natasha.donn@portugalresident.com
