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Article updated at 12:40 am after the Government added information on meetings with partners within the budget
State budget for 2021 delivered, first debate and vote scheduled for October 27 and 28, and until then there are still negotiations to resolve what will come next: the specialty. The Prime Minister started out having only meetings scheduled with PCP and PAN And, questioned by the Observer, two government sources assured that they first waited for a response from the Left Bloc to an email that they had been sent last Saturday and then went on to a new round of negotiations, even before the vote on the generality of the OE. But three hours after delivering this information to the Observer, the Government announced that, after all, it had already planned a meeting with the party headed by Catarina Martins. “The reality is dynamic”, justifies the Government: “We decided to take the plunge and schedule the meeting”.
At 7:29 pm on Friday, an executive source said that meetings were scheduled for next week with the PCP and the PAN, but nothing with the Bloc, according to the Observer. “We are still waiting for BE to respond to our email on Saturday.” At 7:42 pm, another government source reported the same information. “There will be meetings, at least, with PCP and PAN. From BE we are still waiting for answers to the proposals we send them ”. The Observer, who had also spoken with the Bloc on the same issue during the afternoon, questioned the Government about what question was being asked in the email, since Catarina Martins’ party had accused the Executive of, in that same email, having given the negotiations. closed like this unilateral.
The same source assured the Observer that in that last email there was not only information that the Government was going to deliver its Budget Law proposal, as it was then, but also “A new wave of approaches” to the claims of the party led by Catarina Martins. That day, they sent BE the proposal that they were going to deliver on Monday – already with the changes in the materials discussed so far – and requested, the same source endorses, “a global assessment” of what they had proposed. The government guaranteed that it was still waiting for a response. And on that answer depended a new conversation, at the highest level, with the party. BE was also waiting for a government contact (see below) after Costa returned from Brussels, where he was until this Friday.
After all, while advancing these arguments, the Government I was already trying to arrange a meeting with BE, which was agreed at 8:08 p.m. through the Secretary of State for Parliamentary Affairs, the Observer confirmed to the party. Regarding the email, the Government now says that it is still waiting for a response and explains the last minute change with the argument of “never having the meetings closed” and, wanting an “understanding”, decided “Take the step of scheduling the meeting”, including the Block in this round of negotiation. The party will meet on Tuesday with the prime minister, as well as the PCP and the PAN.
The threat of blockade leaves the government with calculator in hand. What are the scenarios for EO approval?
If the abstention of the two parties (PCP and PAN) with whom a conversation was initially scheduled was enough for the 108 PS deputies to make the government proposal viable, the merger of the Left Bloc gives even more scope to the possibility of the OE. pass the first parliamentary vote. Before reaching the specialty, the Budget must approve the generality, but for that the PS must have a majority of deputies present.
The threat of blockade leaves the government with calculator in hand. What are the scenarios for EO approval?
In the meeting with BE, the Government still wants to have the responses to the email it sent and where it also gave an account of its “expectation” regarding the viability of the Budget by the Block, taking “The path taken” in months of negotiations. But here the perceptions are different. BE’s perspective is that a satisfactory answer was not reached, it wanted more progress on four pillars What he defined as priorities for these conversations: reinforcement in the SNS, changes to the labor legislation, new more robust social support and the commitment not to transfer resources from the State to the Resolution Fund without a prior audit of Novo Banco.
On Monday, hours before the delivery of the budget to the Assembly of the Republic, the parliamentary halls were full of exchange of accusations between these two same parties. The Bloc accused the Government of, in this email, giving the negotiations as closed in a unilateral and the government denied that this had happened.
After delivering the government proposal, the rope continued to stretch. Catarina martins granted an interview to Antena 1 to warn that, as it was, the OE did not meet the conditions for it to be possible thanks to the Bloc. On Wednesday, the party’s Political Commission met and decided unanimously that the negotiations with the Government “unfortunately had not been successful”, that the measures set for next year were “symbolic” and that on October 25 it would announce its meaning. of the vote. On Thursday, Catarina Martins returned to office, this time to explain the party’s discontent with the government’s proposal for the new social benefit.
That same Thursday, in an interview with the Observer, the Secretary of State for Parliamentary Affairs He guaranteed that the Government was “available to continue speaking: handing over the EO does not imply concluding the negotiation process.” But at the same time, he did the calculations for the number of votes needed and when asked if the government would weaken if the BE bit the budget, he replied: “The budget can be approved mathematically without the left block. The fact is that for us it does not make much sense for BE to part with this Budget. In our opinion, this Budget does not have any element of rejection compared to the previous Budget ”.
Duarte Cordeiro. “Mathematically, the SO can be approved without the Block. But we don’t see any reason to vote against “
And, on Friday, the vice president of the socialist bench, João Paulo Correia, came to give a tough press conference where he accused Catarina Martins of lying about the New Bank several times. The position of the Government / PS irritated the Bloc.
The declaration of the socialist deputy João Paulo Correia was the climax of the struggle. For BE, this is proof that the PS is “desperate” because it is seeing the Budget “fall piece by piece”. First it was the reduction of the IRS withholding tax, which translates to more liquidity now but results in less refund from the IRS the following year (or even the need to have to pay the IRS), then it was, in the opinion of the part, the question of social benefits for those who lost income, which, by the way it is designed, “It reaches almost no one”. And that was what Catarina Martins tried to show at the press conference on Thursday, where she used graphs, tables and numbers to show that there are even those who will receive less support now than in the critical period of confinement..
“The facts are on our side”It is argued in the Bloco, which knows that in the end, who best manages to sell the idea wins. On the other hand, the Government says it has documentary evidence that it made a final contact requesting comments that never came.
For the Bloco de Esquerda, the situation is clear: “Either we make a Budget that helps people to endure or we make flowers. Y we don’t make flowers “says another source, who recalls that the design of social support for those who lost their jobs due to the crisis is worth “double” the 450 million that the Government is putting into the Budget. It is not enough to “pretend” that the measure is there if in practice it does not reach those who need it.
On the left block it is assumed that the overall budget has passed, with the votes of the PCP (which highlights the shortcomings but has already pointed to the specialty, being able to change the vote at the end), the deputies of the PAN and PSD Madeira. And that takes the pressure off Catarina Martins’ party. “The PS thought we were doing bluff, playing, and now he has discovered that we are not “says the same source, comparing the current situation with the situation in which the two parties found themselves in 2015, when they firmly established the points of convergence that would later serve as the basis for the contraption.
“The conditions are what they are. Either the PS has the flexibility to realize that it has to make concessions to the left, as in 2015, or it does not. It has to be serious, as it was in 2015It is said in Rua da Palma (where the party has its headquarters in Lisbon), highlighting that when António Costa says that the non-approval of the Budget compromises access to community funds “It’s not serious” because it is enough to see what happens in other European countries, such as Spain, where this is not compromised.
For BE, one thing is clear: if this Budget is not approved in the final vote in November, the Government has the “obligation” to present another. And it should not bear the specter of governance in twelfths, because the finance minister himself, at that time Mario Centeno, chose to remain in twelfth at the end of last year, between the legislative elections of October and March, when the OE 2020 was approved. For the Observer, the deputy José Manuel Pureza had already devalued this situation, at the end of September, stop aside the inevitability of a political crisis.
And this Friday, in an interview with Público, António Costa responded directly in disagreement: “I heard Jose Manuel Pureza to BE to say with great tranquility that it is not a problem, because it is governed by twelfths. Yes, you can rule by twelfths. Now I ask if, given the magnitude of the crisis we are experiencing, the ideal way to govern is by twelfths? ”.
José Manuel Pureza: “Without a budget there is no political crisis. The country can continue with twelfths “
