During this afternoon’s political statements in parliament, PS parliamentary leader Pedro Delgado Alves remarked that “the start of the legislature has clearly shown a trend towards increasing the scale of issues inherited from the first term of the AD Government.”
“We have detected failures in several key sectors vital to our community life, which compromise the present and future of the welfare state,” he criticized, accusing the government of focusing on “emptying the far-right’s agenda” and consequently “abandoning many urgent matters it must address.”
The socialist leveled criticisms at health, education, housing, agriculture, and the management of the PRR, accusing the government of “all the ease in the world” only to be confronted “with a reality that does not fit the illusions it propagated,” proposing “measures and policies that could potentially exacerbate the problem.”
During requests for clarification, PSD parliamentary leader Hugo Soares seized on Pedro Delgado Alves’s term “many inconseguimentos”—a word coined by the former president of parliament, Assunção Esteves—in various areas of the social sector.
“I wanted to compare what I believe is incomparable, and many who follow us must have felt as if they were watching the history channel. Let’s talk about inconseguimentos, and I wanted to propose a challenge, which was to compare the state of the art in 11 months with 8 years,” he asserted.
Hugo Soares noted that in health, “more Portuguese have family doctors and waiting times have decreased,” and that in housing, the government doubled “the need for house construction” set by the PS in PPR for execution.
“You no longer see a strike in public education because we have restored the authority and respect of teachers in the classroom,” he added.
In response, the socialist criticized this exercise of “comparing the incomparable” because it seeks to ignore “what has been pointed out as negative over the last 11 months” or “attempt to disguise the numbers.”
Chega, through parliamentary leader Pedro Pinto, expressed that it was “curious to see the PS talking about the welfare state” when, according to him, “they were the face of the problems” in this sector, questioning how the socialists “come here as if they had never been in government.”
