The XXIV Constitutional Government took the traditional family photo today, with the Prime Minister and the 17 ministers, during the first meeting of the Government after taking office on Tuesday.
In the front row of the stairs where the photo was taken, near the garden and swimming pool of the Prime Minister’s official residence, Luís Montenegro, smiling, between the two ministers of state – Paulo Rangel (Foreign Affairs) and Joaquim Miranda Sarmento (Finance) – even made a joke: “We stopped the rain on purpose”.
Completing the front row were the Minister of the Presidency, António Leitão Amaro, the Minister of Justice, Rita Júdice, the Minister of Internal Affairs, Margarida Blasco, and the Minister of State and Territorial Cohesion, Manuel Castro Almeida.
The leader of the CDS-PP and Minister of National Defense, Nuno Melo, was in the second row behind the Prime Minister.
The 18 members of the government – the secretaries of state, who will only be sworn in on Friday, are not yet known – posed for a few minutes for the picture.
“There have been enough clicks,” Montenegro said afterwards.
The meeting of the Council of Ministers, which began shortly after 8:30 a.m., continues without the Minister of State and Foreign Affairs, Paulo Rangel, who has left to attend a NATO meeting in Brussels.
The room where the briefing will take place, at around 12 noon, with the Minister of the Presidency, António Leitão Amaro, already displays the logo of the XXIV Government, which has recovered the previous image with the armorial shield and the chevrons, which had been altered by António Costa’s previous executive.
On Tuesday, the head of state, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, swore in the prime minister and then the 17 ministers of the minority executive formed by PSD and CDS-PP, in the Ambassadors’ Room of the Ajuda National Palace, 23 days after the early parliamentary elections on March 10.
