The chief executive of Madeira, Miguel Albuquerque, said today that the criticism of the former President of the Republic Cavaco Silva to the government of Antonio Costa are “in accordance” with the feeling of the majority of the Portuguese.
“Professor Cavaco Silva’s interventions are always interventions that have a great repercussion in the country and are usually in line with what public opinion is thinking,” said the insular ruler.
Albuquerque, who leads the PSD/CDS-PP coalition regional government, stressed that it is legitimate to question the continuity of the national executive, given the “spectacle of degradation” resulting from the work of the TAP commission of inquiry, but considered that the prime minister still has the opportunity to make a government reshuffle.
The president of Madeira’s executive spoke to journalists in Caniço, municipality of Santa Cruz, contiguous to Funchal to the east, where he participated in the Onion Festival, in a comment on Cavaco Silva’s speech at the closing of the 3rd National Meeting of Social-Democratic Mayors (ASD), on Saturday in Lisbon.
The former President of the Republic accused the prime minister, António Costa, of losing his authority, adding that sometimes prime ministers “decide to resign” due to “a twinge of conscience.”
In a speech highly critical of the socialist government, which he classified as “disastrous,” the former head of state argued that the prime minister “has lost his authority” and “does not perform the competencies that the Constitution attributes to him.
Miguel Albuquerque stressed that “the situation we are witnessing is one of lies, fights within ministries, factional fighting, and all of this leads to the degradation of state institutions and democracy.
“Mr. Prime Minister has to intervene, put order in the Government, make a reshuffle as urgent as possible, and start running the Government,” he said, recalling that the PS won an absolute majority just over a year ago.
“We can’t go into elections every year […]. This idea of dissolving the Assembly [of the Republic] so that the Socialist Party can victimize itself again doesn’t have much consistency,” he added.
The president of the Madeira Government considered, however, that “it is fundamental to give back the voice of the citizens” if no governmental remodeling is done.
The state apparatus, he stressed, is not the property of the PS: “Right now, all these people have appropriated the state institutions and treat the state institutions as if they were their own things,” he lamented.