The Socialist Secretary General, Pedro Nuno Santos, was mandated this Monday by the PS National Political Commission to begin a dialogue with the Government in relation to the State Budget, ensuring “good faith” in the negotiations and refusing “red lines”.
During today’s National Political Commission meeting, Marcos Perestrello, from the party’s National Secretariat, came to inform journalists of this decision by the party body.
Socialist sources said that it was Pedro Nuno Santos who requested a mandate from the National Political Commission to manage the budget process.
“The PS National Political Commission mandated the PS Secretary General to begin a process of dialogue with the Government regarding the approval or not of the next State Budget”, announced the socialist leader.
According to Marcos Perestrello, “there is a firm and genuine desire on the part of the PS to construct a good” budget, but he stressed that the obligation to approve it “falls first and foremost to the Government”.
The PS, according to the leader, is in these negotiations in “good faith” and assured the “concern of not entering these negotiations with red lines”.
“It is the Government that has to govern and the Government has to present a State Budget proposal to the Assembly of the Republic and it has to have the flexibility, the will and the availability to negotiate with the Socialist Party the conditions that allow the Socialist Party to accept this State Budget proposal, creating the conditions for the country to have stability and ideally have a good budget”, he emphasized.
Regarding the specifications that Pedro Nuno Santos will bring to this negotiation, Marcos Perestrello insisted that there are no red lines and admitted that there are “aspects of the budget that will certainly be shared by the Government itself and that are very important for the PS”, namely “maintaining a balanced budget line, reducing debt” or the policy of supporting families.
The PS’s concern is to “start the dialogue with the Government in good faith”, passing on to Luís Montenegro’s executive “the responsibility for approving the budget” since “it has to have the capacity to understand that it does not have an absolute majority and that the conditions in which it exercises Government require it to establish compromises”.
Regarding whether these negotiations should take place before the Government draws up the proposal that it will take to parliament, the socialist considered that “ideally, they should start as soon as possible”.
“The Government has already taken a negative step, which was not to include in the main options of the State Budget for next year the proposals that had already been approved in the Assembly of the Republic and that have some budgetary impact”, he lamented.
When asked about how the negotiation process will begin, Marcos Perestrello considered that “the issue of operationalization” is not the “most important thing at the moment”.
“The PS is available to establish a constructive dialogue regarding the State budget, with the aim of creating conditions of stability for the country, because the country needs it, and with the aim of guaranteeing, as far as possible, a budget that is as good as possible,” he emphasized.
However, the Government and the Prime Minister must be willing to be flexible and willing.
Source: www.jornaldenegocios.pt
