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The President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, loses this Wednesday the power to dissolve the Assembly of the Republic, in case of crisis or threat of political crisis. The head of State had already warned that, as of this date, he would be prevented from exercising that power, having turned to the parties for an understanding in the approval of the State Budgets for 2021 (OE2021).
Article 172 of the Constitution is questioned, which establishes that Parliament cannot be dissolved “in the six months following its election, in the last half of the mandate of the President of the Republic or during the period of the state of siege or state of emergency. ”. Now, taking into account that the mandate of Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa ends on March 9, 2021, as of this Wednesday there are six months left for that date.
The Constitution also establishes that the “breach” of this principle determines “the legal absence of the decree of dissolution”, that is, if the defined criteria are not met, the dissolution of Parliament will be considered void. However, Parliament can only be dissolved by the head of state.
At the end of August, on the OE2021 negotiations between the Government and the left parties of the Socialist Party (PS) – Bloco de Esquerda (BE), Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) and Ecological Party “Os Verdes” (PEV) – as well as of the People-Animals-Nature Party (PAN), Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa described the hypothesis of a political crisis in addition to the crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The President of the Republic is not going to align himself in political crises, so let them think that, if there is no effort to understand, there will be a dissolution of parliament in the little time that the President has for that, which is until September 8 ”Warned Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
The president also stressed that, “the best is to take the path that is reasonable, which is to make concessions, negotiate what is necessary to make a budget feasible, which is not ideal and optimal for anyone, but that is possible for the greatest number.”
In an interview with ‘Diário de Notícias’, in 2017, when he was serving one year as head of state, the President of the Republic expressed the desire to never use the so-called ‘atomic bomb’. “If you ask me if I would like to avoid the atomic bomb because the country was in such a condition that it was preventable, I would,” he said at the time, listing the “requirements” to proceed with the measure provided for in the Constitution.
“The first requirement is that there be a particularly serious institutional crisis. The second is that it is not possible to find a government with the same parliamentary composition. And the third is that it is plausible, with the data available at that time, that the result of the elections will lead to the unblocking of the situation that generated the dissolution ”, he referred to the ‘Diário de Notícias’ in 2017.
Later, in an interview with TVI, in 2019, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa even admitted that, in the event of a repetition of fires such as those of 2017, “there would be a dissolution of Parliament.”
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