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The President of the Republic and candidate for re-election Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa closed the debate with Tiago Mayan Gonçalves, held by RTP this Sunday night, with an attack on the Liberal Initiative for having almost always voted against the state of emergency, asking “what would be the balance in terms of deaths” if Portugal had not resorted for the first time to this possibility provided by the Constitution. For his part, the liberal candidate, who in the course of half an hour accused the interlocutor of having been a “propaganda minister” of the António Costa government, replied that “the president’s state of emergency means that the country is facing destruction. economic and social ”.
Tiago Mayan Gonçalves directly referred to the weekend afternoon curfew as an example of the negative consequences of the state of emergency, which led to “the country having to focus on supermarkets” on Saturday mornings . And he accused Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa of “choosing to mistrust the Portuguese”, although, in the opinion of the liberal candidate, everyone is aware that Christmas and New Years would not be the same as the previous ones, as they were prepared during the summer, “when the president shared minis and Berlin balls and organized plans to dive on the beach.”
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa said that the “ultra-liberal countries that most opposed the state of emergency ended up adopting it,” pointing to the United States and the United Kingdom as cases in which it was necessary to inject money into the economy and provide social support, and questioned how a A government that followed the ideology of Mayan Gonçalves could face the problem of the pandemic, particularly in households.
After a start in which the reelection candidate listened calmly to the interlocutor’s attacks, beginning by saying that “in a democracy there can be no censorship” and that “the President of the Republic is subject to scrutiny”, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa He challenged Mayan Gonçalves to say what other laws he would veto if he had been in the Belém Palace for the past five years. The candidate supported by the Liberal Initiative pointed to the example of the “democratic farce” in which PS and PSD “combined the election” of the presidents of the Coordination and regional development, describing Marcelo as “candidate of the owners of all this” , to which he asked if the interlocutor thought that the mayors who had the right to vote in this process “are all government puppets.”
Subsequently, responding to a question from Carlos Daniel, who moderated the debate, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa spoke as head of state who will receive the parties with parliamentary representation on Monday, reaffirming that he intends to renew the state of emergency for only Eight days. Something that, in his opinion, will confirm the impact of Christmas and the New Year on the Covid-19 pandemic, specifically in the Infarmed meeting that will take place on the 12th. And he added having “the feeling that there was laxism” in the last days. He is also concerned about the British variant of the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and the effect it may have on the number of hospital admissions and intensive care.
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