Country cannot go from crisis to crisis with two-year provisional governments – PM

  • Lusa
  • 4 January 2022

António Costa has stated that sustained economic growth in the country is incompatible with frequent political crises in Portugal.

The prime minister has warned that sustained economic growth in Portugal is incompatible with frequent political crises in the country and with “two-year provisional governments” and considered the existence of political stability to be essential.

This position was transmitted by António Costa at the end of the speech with which he closed the presentation of the PS (socialist) electoral programme in Lisbon.

In the most political part of his speech, the socialist leader defended that Portugal has “a very important set of tasks ahead of it: Overcoming the pandemic, focusing on recovery and possessing the ambition to progress and go further”.

“For this to be possible, we need a government that looks at the country and maintains policy stability over the next four years,” he said, then left a warning.

“To meet these challenges, we cannot go from crisis to crisis, we cannot live in two-year interim governments. We need a stable government for the next four years,” he declared.

According to António Costa, the PS is standing in the parliamentary elections of January 30 “to ensure stability in the country, but also to respond to concrete commitments in relation to families and businesses that were contained in the [rejected] State Budget for 2022”.

“We already know that, without a PS majority, these commitments cannot pass in parliament. We need to focus on recovery and for that we need stability”, he argued, in a speech in which he promised to restore retroactively to 1 January of this year all the measures that were part of the rejected budget, particularly with regard to pensions and tax relief.