Pedro Nuno Santos returns to election pledge
PS leader Pedro Nuno Santos has challenged other parties today to follow-through on his party’s electoral pledge to scrap unpopular electronic motorway tolls (long deemed illegal by the European Commission) on highways originally designed to be ‘free’.
In the final stretch of his speech at the closing of the debate on the government programme this morning, Mr Santos presented five proposals for parliamentary debate.
Among these are the reduction of VAT on electricity to a reduced rate for more than three million Portuguese and exclusion of offspring’s incomes as a condition for access to the Solidarity Supplement for the Elderly.
But it was at the moment when he announced his intention to eliminate tolls on what are known as ‘ex-SCUTs’ (roads constructed with EU money to be ‘free’ but later tolled electronically) that the House reacted strongly, writes Lusa, “forcing parliamentary president José Pedro Aguiar-Branco, to intervene”.
Santos said that he didn’t “understand” the strong reactions. “If you agree, good riddance. Go ahead and approve the PS initiative,” he insisted.
The other two proposals involve increasing the deductible expenditure on rent to €800 and to extend the support for student accommodation – currently paid to scholarship students – to the middle class, paying all displaced students whose family income goes up to the 6th IRS bracket.
It needs to be said that up until the ‘election race’, PS Socialists had said, time and again, that there was no way they could eliminate tolls altogether, due mainly to contracts with companies maintaining them.
Source material: LUSA
