The Socialist leader today deplored “the arrogance” with which the Prime Minister addressed the PS and the pattern of “lack of dialogue”, with Luís Montenegro countering the PS’s record in the years he led the government.
In the first request for clarification to the Prime Minister at the start of the debate on the Program of the XXIV Constitutional Government, which runs until Friday in parliament, Pedro Nuno Santos considered that Luís Montenegro “is off to a bad start”.
“I begin by deploring the arrogance with which he addressed the PS in this speech,” he emphasized, noting that Montenegro leads a party that “failed nine budgets” and has now “changed its position and vision on political stability”.
For the PS leader, despite the PSD/CDS-PP government’s talk of dialogue in including 60 measures from other parties in the Government Program, “it’s important for the Portuguese to know that there was no dialogue at all” and that this is “just a pattern” that had already been seen in the election of the President of the Assembly of the Republic.
“This is not how you build a majority, this is not how you guarantee stability or durability for a government,” he warned.
In his response, Luís Montenegro reiterated the executive’s intention to “maintain a constitutive political dialogue”.
Although he said he didn’t want to discuss the “concept of arrogance” with Pedro Nuno Santos, the Prime Minister pointed out to the new PS leader the Socialists’ track record over the years he was at the head of the government.
“If this isn’t arrogance, then we have a different concept,” he said.
