Party leader describes “growing state of insecurity in Portugal”
The leader of Portugal’s right-wing party CHEGA has called for an urgent debate in parliament on January 7, dedicated to security in Portugal, following the fatal shooting that took place in a Viseu shopping centre last night.
With the presumed shooter still ‘on-the-run’, and the government having spent the festive period impressing the ‘safety of Portugal’, CHEGA’s figurehead and founder, André Ventura, held a press conference today to claim that there is a “growing sense of insecurity in Portugal”.
Reports on his message add that he has already written to President Marcelo “suggesting that an extraordinary Council of State be held” to debate these problems.
As for the urgent debate, Mr Ventura said he hopes that a consensus can be reached “that we are worse off, that insecurity is becoming the new normal for the Portuguese” and, that a “package against insecurity” can be approved, tackling “the fight against illegal weapons” and enforcing increased penalties for “crimes related to organised crime, such as drug trafficking, trafficking in human beings, trafficking and the creation of prostitution networks”.
Reports stress that Mr Ventura insisted that organised crime is on the increase in Portugal, without citing official reports. He also suggested that “organised networks have settled here because they feel there is no, or little, control over their activities”.
Emphasising that “we need more prevention and we need to give the police authority”, Ventura went on to criticise “those who attack the security forces for carrying out raids or operations in Martim Moniz’.
“They are the same people who today are silent about what happened in Viseu (…) saying nothing about the need to have a police force with more resources, more strength and more authority”.
And then on to a popular CHEGA theme: the perceived impunity of the country’s gypsy (Roma) community, which Ventura claims has a “culture of weapons, subsidy dependence and disrespect for legal rules”.
“The problem of the Roma in Portugal is the problem of the state, which has stopped looking at this as an issue that should be resolved in an integrative way. We’re all going to pay a price for this”, he said.
In what will have been ‘a gift’ of an occasion for the party leader, he spoke of the “growing impact of violence on the daily lives of Portuguese people”, describing the shooting yesterday in Viseu, in which one woman lost her life and two others were injured, as a reflection of “a peaceful land” turned into a stage for “open-air violence”.
It was a speech that seemingly covered everything possible in order to outline “little control” being exercised by authorities – and a very different picture to the one being painted (or at least, attempting to be painted) by politicians.
Whether or not André ventura gets his ‘urgent debate’ on January 7; whether or not President Marcelo agrees to convening an extraordinary Council of State to debate security (or the perceived lack of it in certain areas), André Ventura has succeeded in grabbing the headlines – making the discourse about Portugal being one of the safest countries in the world look a little more relative than it did yesterday.
