The president of the Liberal Initiative, Mariana Leitão, said that the party will insist on deepening the autonomy of Madeira, with proposals in the State Budget.
© Horacio Villalobos#Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images
10/10/2026
by
Lusa
A president of the Liberal Initiative (IL), Mariana Leitão, today defended the importance of deepening regional autonomy and indicated that the party will present proposals related to the demands of Madeirans in the state budget.
“There is the issue of autonomy, which for us is something important, an autonomy that needed to be strengthened,” she also told IL’s deputy to journalists on the edge of lunch in Machico, in eastern Madeira, which marked the ‘rentrée’ of the territorial core of the party in the region, gathering militants and sympathizers.
Mariana Leitão assured that the party will continue to “insist that this greater autonomy is a reality” and stressed that the deepening could be achieved “through the tax issue, giving Madeira the power to decide fiscally what the best framework is, to make own management of resources”.
“ This autonomy needs to be strengthened. One of the forms is through the Regional Finance Act and another way [is] also through the constitutional review that, all indicates, was now put in the drawer by the PSD ", added.
In his view, this is “an additional opportunity for this deepening of autonomy that would allow Madeira to have a greater capacity to make its own decisions, in the way it understood best, without so much depending on the goodwill of any government in Lisbon”.
As for the State Budget for 2027, Mariana Leitão stated that the proposal “continues to keep its hand in the pocket of the Portuguese, continues with a very high tax burden, it is a budget that increases expenditure again”.
The leader also criticized the “wrong public policy” of the PSD/CDS-PP Government, such as the participation in REN’s capital and the announced acquisition of BCP shares, arguing that it makes no sense “that the State continue to spend money on companies that have no benefit to the citizen”.
The government said on Friday, in a statement, that the objective of State participation in REN's capital is complete, after agreement with Fidelity for the acquisition of 5.3% of the company.
Mariana Monteiro also stressed that this “is a Budget that serves people nowhere and Madeira is no exception”.
For this reason, the party “certainly presenting proposals in the specialty also for Madeira”, because there are concrete demands from this autonomous region that “make sense, in particular mobility issues”.
“This Budget, not serving people and which falls short of the needs of the country, is obviously below the needs of Madeira,” he emphasized.
On his visit to the region, he said that it would happen within the framework of “continuous work” that the party does to “help pass on the message that the country can be much better”.
“ We are used to being ruled always by the same parties that do not respond to people. Here in Madeira it is even more glaring, for decades always governed by the same party [PSD], and people feeling that their life is increasingly complicated”, he said.
Mariana Leitão argued that “there are no answers for people” – more and more the State spends “more money, above its possibilities, and it’s time to reverse that”.