À Lusa, the parliamentary leader of the PSD, Hugo Soares, stated that the Social Democrats will vote against this proposal.
Speaking to journalists at the Assembly of the Republic, the leader of Chega also indicated that his party will vote against the establishment of the “committee of inquiry into the preparation, readiness, and planning of large-scale crises and emergencies following the energy blackout of April 28” as it “does not make much sense.”
The positions of the two largest parliamentary groups dictate the rejection of the initiative, which will be discussed on Thursday and voted on the following day.
“Chega will vote against this committee of inquiry. We need to have committees of inquiry for what is truly important for the Portuguese at this moment and for what it is important for parties to publicly scrutinize and not waste time on ‘fait divers’, which is what Livre wants to do,” stated André Ventura.
The leader of Chega questioned “what sense it makes to create a committee of inquiry for what happened during a few hours in Portugal,” arguing that “it would make sense if there were currently substantiated indications of any irregularity that could have a legal nature to be reported to the authorities and a parliamentary investigation carried out.”
“The existing committees in parliament are perfectly capable of questioning the Government and scrutinizing what happened. What different outcome could we obtain from a committee of inquiry compared to what the Minister of Economy, Environment, or Energy might say about the blackout? Nothing, a committee of inquiry does not add any mechanism to a power outage,” he argued.
In the proposal, Livre explains that this committee of inquiry should not exceed 180 days and aims to determine the causes of the April 28 blackout, assess the preparedness of public entities for crisis situations, and evaluate the performance of public authorities.
