President to address nation at 6.30pm
Prime minister Luís Montenegro has seemingly called time on all the political posturing of recent days to announce he will be voting for a motion of confidence in the government.
The PM was speaking at the start of this afternoon’s debate on the second motion of censure to be presented in less than a fortnight, insisting that there cannot be any doubt about his government’s conditions for continuing to implement its programme.
The move follows a meeting the PM had yesterday with President Marcelo, who, it is reported, will be addressing the nation at 6.30 this evening.
“The country needs political clarification, and this is the moment”, Mr Montenegro told parliament. “The country cannot remain a prisoner to the selfishness and tactics of those leading the opposition” (a direct jibe at the latest move by PS Socialists…)
“It would be unacceptable – because it would be contrary to the national interest – for a political party to repeatedly stand in the way of motions of censure and then continue to nurture a climate of suspicion, and do so with the declared intention of contaminating the political environment with the one and only aim of wearing down the government and the prime minister,” he added – referring to the news that the PS is planning to abstain in the motion of censure today, but continue with a strategy of ‘slow cooking’ the executive, with a parliamentary commission of inquiry.
New elections may be ‘a necessary evil’
Reiterating that the electorate certainly do not understand the reasons for so much political turmoil, Montenegro said the obvious: “We cannot play games with the country, and we cannot play games with the lives of the Portuguese” – which is patently what the parties in opposition are doing, in his eyes.
“For my part and that of the government, we don’t shy away from scrutiny in all areas. We have taken transparency where no one has gone before. We have applied to ourselves what the opposition leaders have never applied to themselves,” Montenegro added.
But, clearly, the leader of the executive has decided the nonsense stops here: the government is not willing to “continue living in an atmosphere of permanent insinuations and intrigues that have only one objective: the degradation of political and governing life with the pretence of drawing partisan or even individual dividends from it for the concrete situation of those responsible for the opposition parties”.
The PM admitted that the prospect of early elections just eleven months after the PSD/ CDS minority government took office “is not desirable (…) But it will be a necessary evil to avoid the degradation of institutions and the loss of political stability due to the will of some agitators”.
According to the Constitution of the Republic, the government can ask the Assembly of the Republic to approve a vote of confidence on a statement of general policy or on any relevant matter of national interest.
The rejection of a motion of confidence implies the resignation of the government.
This is a gamble, in other words: a gamble on the true agenda of parties in the opposition, and a gamble on the fact that the electorate will understand it all, and, if necessary, vote the government back into office, this time with a working majority.
Our earlier report that this threatened to be another groundhog day in a turgid soap opera was way off the mark: this is the day that the worm turned. And as news reports fall over themselves to discuss this development with parties of the opposition, it seems that CHEGA and Bloco de Esquerda are already focused on voting against the motion of confidence, ie in forcing the country into early elections.
UPDATE 5pm: PS Socialists announce they too will be voting against the motion of confidence. In the words of presidential candidate Luís Marques Mendes, it looks like opposition politicians are prepared to enter the Guinness Book of Records for irresponsibility.
