“We were summoned by the government for a meeting with four agenda points. None of these points are related to the State Budget. I can assure you. This is one of three options: either someone is smuggling information, or the government called parties for different meetings,” said Paulo Raimundo, following participation in a CDU campaign rally in Paredes.
Last Thursday, the Minister of Parliamentary Affairs, Carlos Abreu Amorim, announced that the government would begin a series of meetings next Wednesday with parliamentary groups and individual deputies “on various issues,” including the State Budget for the upcoming year.
In these meetings, Abreu Amorim stated, the Minister of Finance will “reveal the major budgetary options.”
When asked about the four agenda points he referred to, Paulo Raimundo explained that one concerns the Grandes Opções do Plano, which is not the State Budget. The others involve international aspects, although he avoided disclosing specific details.
“We also know that two parties are effectively jostling with each other to see who is most complicit with the government’s choices. The PS and Chega are seeing who is the more complicit. Who, pardon the expression, is sort of like the bride of this government,” the communist leader added, acknowledging, “that the candidates for the government’s bride may have other types of spaces.”
The Grandes Opções do Plano is a tool of the government’s economic policy, including multi-annual budget programming.
