Sorting chaos in health; teachers/ police pay disputes immediate priorities
Portugal’s new centre-right government – due to be sworn in this afternoon – is expected to ‘hit the ground running’: a 60-day timeline given to enacting measures (like addressing teachers/ police pay disputes and the chaos in the health system) that will ‘keep the wolves at bay’: wolves being the combined forces of the left, radical left and radical right.
After a three week ‘silence’, the words of prime minister Luís Montenegro are being anticipated intently: even more those of President Marcelo.
Commentators point out that Marcelo’s speech at the swearing in of the last PS Socialist government conditioned the future: he said the government had gained a majority on the basis of one man (António Costa), and if that man resigned, parliament would be dissolved.
Less than two years later, that exact sequence of events ‘came to pass’: leading to legislative elections which elected a minority government of the centre-right not expected to last the full four-year tenure.
Except that AD (standing for Democratic Alliance) has already ‘surprised’: its leader Luís Montenegro has already surpassed widespread predictions that he would never be elected prime minister. His comparative ‘silence’ in the aftermath of votes being counted appears to owe much to careful ‘planning’: the composition of the new executive is widely seen as one that brings together a ‘wealth of competences and experience’, a lot of it earned in Brussels – and now, the next hurdle will be the presentation of the government’s programme, for discussion over the days of April 11-12.
The plan, as we have been consistently told, is to use the first 60 days to enact ‘populist measures’ that no party would want to disagree with.
However, CHEGA is already flexing its muscles, calling on Luís Montenegro to “rethink” his choice of Minister for Interior Administration Margarida Blasco. This seems highly unlikely as Ms Blasco is described as one of Montenegro’s “strong choices”: she is a judge from the Supreme Tribunal known for having zero tolerance for racism within the police force… (racism being an habitual criticism bandied about with regard to CHEGA).
One less discussed priority of this incoming government is the (superficially banal) issue of the government’s ‘logo’.
This is a ‘row’ that Luís Montenegro vowed he would settle ‘as soon as the government entered office’.
This essentially means the PS Socialist-supported logo, described as a fried egg in the middle of the flag of Italy, will be dispensed with, to return to the more traditional logo, depicting castles and religious imagery.
In view of the country’s deeply pressing issues, this might seem completely irrelevant, but the ‘outrage’ with which the subject was handled recently on SIC Notícias by journalist Ricardo Costa (half brother of the outgoing prime minister) show that some people believe it is time for a more ‘woke’ logo, that divorces itself from Portugal’s history as a colonial power.
natasha.donn@portugalresident.com
