After weeks of uncertainty, it is now certain that Portugal will have approvals in parliament the General State Budgets for 2025. With a Government without a majority and the extreme right announcing that it will vote against, the possible solution to avoid a political crisis was presented on Thursday by the leader of the Portuguese socialists, Pedro Nuno Santos: an abstention that allows the right-wing Executive to apply its program, avoiding a forced electoral repetition at the beginning of next year.
In an announcement to the nation during television news, Pedro Nuno Santos justified his position by the fact that “only seven months have passed since the last elections” and that, if the elections were repeated, “it is not clear that there would be a stable majority.”
The latest polls show a trend towards stabilization compared to the elections in March this year, with a Parliament with a right-wing majority. The main change is the loss of voters from the far-right party, Chega, in favor of the traditional right-wing party, PSD, which leads the Government and which would be the main beneficiary of a possible repeat of the elections – which would be the third in least three years old.
The position of the socialists comes after they demanded that the Executive review the large tax reduction for young people up to 35 years of age and cancel the tax reduction on company profits. The Government of Luís Montenegro presented a counterproposal, reducing the magnitude of the tax reduction to a more modest figure.
A political crisis is postponed
In recent weeks, several socialist deputies with media presence and former members of the Government have publicly shown themselves in favor of making the State budget viable to avoid a political crisis. These public positions have been criticized by the socialist general secretary for creating media noise around the party’s decision.
Even so, Pedro Nuno Santos reaffirmed this Thursday that “it is normal for the main opposition party to vote against the General State Budgets”, as happened during the years in which the Socialist Party was at the head of the Government. The leader of the socialists is opposed to the existence of “formal or informal” agreements with the right-wing PSD party in areas other than “national security and defense”, making it clear that this year’s vote is an exception.
This decision by the socialists was essential to understand the future of the Government, after the leader of the extreme right, André Ventura, publicly disagreed with Luís Montenegro. The controversy centered on an alleged proposal by the prime minister that guaranteed the entry of the far-right party into the Government in exchange for the Chega party’s support for the General State Budgets in Parliament. Montenegro was quick to publicly deny that such a proposal had existed, accusing the Chega leader of being a “liar.” For this reason, André Ventura announced that his party would vote against the budgets, leaving everything in the hands of the socialists.
In Portugal it is not mandatory to go to elections if the General State Budgets are rejected, but the usual practice of the current President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, has been to force new elections whenever there is no majority to approve the budget project.
Once the possibility of a political crisis has been ruled out, it is expected that, despite the Government not having a parliamentary majority, conditions of government stability will exist until the next budget cycle, in October 2025. Until then, the socialists have promised to go through the country and present their proposals, in an attempt to recover support for a possible electoral advance.
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