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Elected President of the Republic on January 24, 2016, in the first round, with 52% of the votes, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa sent “there for November” this year the announcement of his decision regarding a possible re-election in the elections presidential elections of 2021, which he sustained. opened during his tenure.
“And, obviously, one thing is certain: any decision that you, as a citizen, make will always be after the call for elections,” he said last February.
Five years ago, after presenting his presidential candidacy, the former president of the PSD enunciated his reading of the constitutional powers of the head of state in matters of dissolution of parliament and formation of governments in a speech in Voz do Operário, in Lisbon, on October 24, 2015.
In that intervention, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa promised that, if elected, he would do everything possible to “not burden” his successor with “avoidable problems in relation to the powers of the State” and considered it negative that Portugal lived “six, seven, eight months without the state. “
At the time, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa argued that “there are no announced dissolutions of the parliament, that is, the assessment to be carried out must be carried out when the need for this exercise arises or not, and not months or years before.”
“The President of the Republic must do everything in his power to achieve viable and lasting governments, involving the State Budgets,” he defended, in that same speech.
Assuming himself as a moderate and defender of stability, in his first three and a half years of presidential term, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa lived with a minority government of the PS led by António Costa, supported by unprecedented left-wing agreements in parliament and saw the legislature arrive. until the end.
In this new legislature, the PS obtained a reinforced vote in the legislatures of October 6, 2019, but again without an absolute majority, and this time it formed an executive not supported by any written agreement, a condition that the President of the Republic himself considered unnecessary .
After a year at the helm of the State, in an interview with Diário de Notícias, the president expressed his desire never to use the so-called “atomic bomb”, thus distinguishing himself from his elected predecessors in democracy, but specified the conditions in which he admitted a scenario of dissolution of parliament and calling of early legislative elections
“The first requirement is that there is a particularly serious institutional crisis. The second is that it is not possible to find a government within the framework of the same parliamentary composition. And the third is that it be plausible, with the data available at that time, that the The result of the elections will lead to the unblocking of the situation that generated the dissolution, ”he said.
In March 2019, he added another factor that could have led him to exercise the power of dissolution: the repetition of fires like those of 2017, which caused more than a hundred deaths in Portugal.
“If there were an identical situation the following year, there would be a dissolution of parliament,” said Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, in an interview with TVI.
