The Council of State is meeting today at Belém Palace in Lisbon ‘to analyse the international situation’. Initially called regarding developments in Ukraine, the United States’ attack on Venezuela (in which the country’s president and first lady were captured) has put that country on the agenda, particularly as it has the world’s largest Portuguese diaspora (around half a million citizens/ Portuguese descendants).
The meeting also takes place in the context of an official campaign for the presidential elections of January 18 – in which two State Councillors, Luís Marques Mendes and André Ventura, are running and have announced their attendance – and following a visit by the Prime Minister to Kyiv on December 20, during which Luís Montenegro declared that “nothing prevents” Portugal from sending troops to Ukraine in peacetime – something it is understood that President Marcelo would have liked to have discussed with the prime minister beforehand.
The Kyiv meeting also saw Ukraine’s president announce an agreement with Portugal for the joint production of underwater drones.
This will be the 40th, and most likely the last, meeting of the presidential political advisory body during Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa’s two terms as Portugal’s head of state, following a break of almost ten months since the previous one – held for the purposes of dissolving parliament which led to the early legislative elections of May 18.
On Christmas Eve, the president – who will remain in office until March in spite of the presidential elections on January 18 – mentioned that he has been waiting more than six months for the election of new state councillors from the current parliament. As Lusa remarks, parliament has never taken so long to hold the election of its five members to the Council of State.
All in all, Marcelo is clearly not delighted about the way these final months of his mandate have been handled when it comes to communication: “When fundamental decisions are being made about Ukraine, I discuss them in the Supreme National Defence Council, which I preside over, and they are not discussed in the State Council?”, he remarked recently.
The president thus wants his political advisory body today to analyse “Europe’s position in terms of financial support for Ukraine, which commits states for the future through European debt” and analyse “a Portuguese military commitment or not, in the event of a future ceasefire.”
Political leaders are ‘divided’ over the PM’s openness to sending Portuguese troops into Ukraine to help keep the peace, and this has been highlighted during the current presidential campaign.
Source: LUSA
