“Preparing this budget debate involves focusing on what sets us apart, where we are different. With the PS, growth is for everyone,” stated Eurico Brilhante Dias at the opening of a panel on public services and territories during the PS parliamentary sessions in Penafiel.
The leader of the PS parliamentary group noted “a clear distance” and “a gulf separating” the socialists from the Government’s proposal, which he described as “based on blind tax reductions, flexibility, and labor precariousness.”
Eurico Brilhante Dias countered that the PS “seeks growth with social and territorial cohesion.”
“It is essential for the Portuguese to understand that there is an alternative to this PSD government with the CDS. The alternative to this Government is the PS, as the Portuguese clearly stated last Sunday, giving the Socialist Party 128 municipal presidencies, which prominently distinguished us within the opposition,” he said.
The PS parliamentary leader took the opportunity to reiterate the reason for abstaining from the State Budget for 2026 (OE2026), as decided last week by PS bodies.
Considered by Brilhante Dias that the PS’s abstention “is clear from a political standpoint,” he began by explaining that “the elections were in May 2025 and this is the first budget.”
“We have been in a continuous succession of legislative elections, and there comes a point when we need to stop to govern and govern based on democratic legitimacy,” he said, adding that under the current institutional framework, “the President of the Republic cannot dissolve the Assembly of the Republic.”
The fact that this is the last year of the Recovery and Resilience Plan is another reason why the PS seeks to ensure political stability.
“The political framework is clear, but these two options, both the overarching IRC cut and the flexiblization and precariousness of labor relations, are choices of the Government, which presents them as two main pillars to grow and achieve the growth it promised the Portuguese it would achieve,” he noted.
