“How can you come here and tell us that everything worked? How can you come here and say that you invested, that you did something, that there was prevention, when we know, we saw, and we realized that there wasn’t, and that we are among the worst in Europe on this matter?” questioned André Ventura during an intervention at the Permanent Commission of the Assembly of the Republic debating the wildfire situation in Portugal.
Addressing the Prime Minister, Ventura recalled that at the beginning of the month, the Minister of Internal Administration justified that Portugal had not yet resorted to the European Civil Protection Mechanism as it had sufficient resources.
“By the 16th, 139,000 hectares of territory had burned, and Portugal had to ask for support. Prime Minister, this is not just inattention, this is not just looking the other way. When this happens, when a Minister of Internal Administration does this, we know that this has a name, it’s called incompetence,” he accused.
The leader of Chega also challenged the Prime Minister to “not be like the PS” and “admit in this house that he failed, that the Minister of Internal Administration failed” and to ensure that “none of this incompetence happens next year.”
André Ventura also contradicted statements from the PSD parliamentary leader, who said that “there is no evidence that the State failed” in fighting the fires, advising Hugo Soares to visit the burned areas to see “what failed.”
The Chega deputy asserted that Portugal has “the largest burned area in Europe” and is “one of the three worst countries in the European Union in terms of investment in fighting and preventing fires.”
“Prime Minister, you cannot tell us that it went well, because it did not,” he argued, criticizing that Portugal does not have its own aerial resources for firefighting given the “history of fires” and “destruction of the forest environment.”
“There’s no point in going to Pontal to talk about Formula 1, there’s no point in going to Pontal to announce big things when all that is done is useless, because we lose the most useful things, which are the territory, the land, the people, the lives of people. And that is what the Prime Minister should understand,” he emphasized, referring to Luís Montenegro’s speech during the PSD’s annual event in Algarve.
