With independent television journalists reporting tirelessly on Portugal’s continuing wildfire calamity, it has become glaringly obvious that many communities are being left to fight walls of advancing flames on their own; that water supplies are dwindling and that support in the form of the prime minister and the minister of interior administration has been so lacking that it is now an embarrassment.
CHEGA leader André Ventura said on SIC last night that, for his party at least, this minister (Maria Lúcia Amaral) has exceeded all limits of acceptance. It is time for her to go.
Ventura’s stance comes after days of silence – filled only by television reports that show how chaotic combat appears to be organised, and how so many people say “there was not one firefighter in the village when the fire arrived”.
In one area, a village was left to become completely surrounded by flames, so that firefighters could not even reach it. No-one could get in, and no-one could get out. And the villagers fought on, united, to save their homes.
Other political figures have said barely a thing: PS leader José Luís Carneiro has suggested that the government ‘urgently convene the national Civil Protection Commission’, but André Ventura dismisses this idea, saying it will “solve nothing”.
In Ventura’s mindset, “the government has got to govern”. And this is not what it has been doing in terms of the weeks of fires breaking out all over the north and central interior.
Yesterday, with the death of one firefighter when an engine overturned in Covilhã – and the ‘statement’ by the Minister of Interior Administration (that the situation of alert was to be extended by 48-hours) without allowing journalists’ questions – CHEGA’s uncharacteristic patience snapped.
Echoing the criticism, and sense of disbelief, that came last week from presidential candidate Henrique Gouveia e Melo, Ventura weighed in with everything he feels has failed: “We should have activated the European Civil Protection Mechanism earlier”, the prime minister (who we have all been told has ‘cut short his holiday’), should be on the ground where fires are burning, and so should his minister of Interior Administration, who gives press statements in pearls.
Ventura told SIC that: ‘if the prime minister does not understand that he cannot have a minister who ignores what is happening, leaves local authorities alone, and does not care about people’s suffering, I tell him: CHEGA has reached its limit”.
As a result, the CHEGA leader is calling for an urgent meeting in parliament to ‘ask that the prime minister dismiss the minister of Internal Administration’.
People need to feel that political leaders “are there for them”, he stressed – a theme that has been widely aired over social media, harking back to old images when the country’s president of the day (Ramalho Eanes) was actually right up ‘on the front line’ in his shirtsleeves, beating flames back with the people of the affected community.
Source material: SIC Notícias
