Parliament to vote of confidence motion with government fall likely

The Portuguese parliament on Tuesday is debating and voting on a motion of confidence in the government, which has already been announced as ‘rejected’ and which will lead to the dismissal of the executive, just one year and one day after the centre-right coalition Democratic Alliance’s victory in the early parliamentary elections.

The motion, entitled ‘Effective stability, with a sense of responsibility’, was announced by the prime minister, Luís Montenegro, on 5 March, at the opening of the debate on the Communist Party (PCP) motion of censure on the PSD/CDS-PP (the Democratic Alliance coalition parties) minority executive.

The debate, scheduled for 3pm, will start with a 12-minute speech by the government, followed by the debate, and a closing by the executive, lasting a total of 151 minutes.

At the end, if the motion is not withdrawn (a hypothesis already ruled out by the government), the vote will immediately follow. In addition to PSD and CDS-PP, only the Liberal Initiative Party (IL) has announced that it will vote in favour, with the Socialist Party (PS), the right wing Chega Party, PCP, Left Bloc (BE) and the Livre Party guaranteeing that the document will be ‘rejected’.

If the motion of confidence is not approved, this will be communicated by the speaker of parliament, José Pedro Aguiar-Branco, to the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, for the purposes of Article 195 of the Constitution, which states that failure to approve a motion of confidence implies the dismissal of the government.

In an interview with TVI on Monday evening, the prime minister, Luís Montenegro, rejected the scenario of withdrawing the motion of confidence, considering that this “doesn’t make sense”, as parliament needs to confirm that the conditions exist for the government to fulfil its programme.

Also on Monday evening in a television interview with SIC TV, the secretary-general of the Socialist Party, Pedro Nuno Santos, also dismissed the idea of a retreat in the vote against the motion of confidence, considering that the prime minister’s clarifications on his family business are not sufficient and that resorting to this parliamentary instrument is “a call for a cowardly dismissal”.

In democracy in Portugal (since 1974), this will be the 12th motion of confidence presented by governments to parliament, the last having been approved on 31 July 2013.

If the ‘rejection’ is confirmed, the 24th government will be the second executive to fall following the presentation of a motion of confidence, after the fall of the 1st Constitutional Government in 1977, led by the socialist Mário Soares.

In view of this scenario, the country’s president has already stated that the possible dates for holding early parliamentary elections as soon as possible are 11 or 18 May.

The current political crisis began in February with the publication of a news item by the Correio da Manhã newspaper about Luís Montenegro’s family company, Spinumviva, which at the time was owned by his children and his wife, to whom he is married in communion of acquisitions (in which each spouse owns only the property that they had before they married and the property that, after the marriage and during the marriage, they receive by succession or by gift), – and which passed this week only to the children of both – raising doubts about compliance with the regime of incompatibilities and impediments for holders of public and political office.

This was followed by weeks of news – including the weekly Expresso newspaper report that hotel and casino operator Solverde was paying Spinumviva a monthly fee of €4,500 – two motions of censure against the government, by Chega and the PCP, both of which were rejected, and the PS’s announcement that it would be presenting a commission of inquiry.