OE2027: Aguiar-White calls for consensus to guard public accounts

O president of the Assembly of the Republic today called for consensus among the parties in the discussion of the state budget for next year in order to guard public accounts.

“ It is also a requirement of the proper fulfilment of the mandate that we have all received from the Portuguese to make consensus, and I believe that now, too, in the discussion of the State Budget, this dimension of the consensus to guard public accounts, to allow solutions to be found that, in some of them, will also have to result from this consensus, happen. I am hopeful that this will be so”, he said.

José Pedro Aguiar-Branco spoke to journalists on the margins of CNN Summit, which takes place at the Estoril Congress Centre (Lisbon District) and argued that everyone should interpret “correctly the results of the elections”.

The President of Parliament said that “the Portuguese want stability and when they vote with a configuration of the Assembly of the Republic as the current one, they also express the will to reach consensus”, he argued, arguing that “fragmentation is not the result of chance, it is the fruit of society that expresses its will”.

And he called for “political maturity” for political agents “to be able to distinguish what is essential from what is not essential and for consensus to be made on these matters to enable people to solve their problems”.

During the summit, in an intervention on “the political system and the quality of democracy”, one of the topics addressed by the President of the Assembly of the Republic, was housing.

“ Much of the housing problem is explained in my view by the adoption of emotional legislative acts. It was not only in Spain with the Maricarmen case, we spent many years here doing the same thing ", sustained.

“ I remember inflamed and emotional speeches in Parliament against speculators and owners regarding the price of houses, the conclusion of that speech was the approval of a new tax on owners. I must say that it was the first time someone decided that the best way to lower the price of a product was to increase the tax on that same product. The prices of the houses, of course, increased, but the passion was serene ", exemplified.

José Pedro Aguiar-Branco considered that the same happened to “the land law, which ended up with the urbanizable land to calm the eco-anxiety of some” or the “policy of roofs to rents throughout this Europe, which removed houses from the market to the detriment of new tenants”.

“ Emotional legislation, in my view, does not solve citizens’ problems, sometimes even create other more serious problems,” he said, saying that “emotion is part of life and politics, objectively and rationally assessing the outcome of policies is too often not”.

“ We are so emotional in politics that we lose sight of the long term. We talk about housing when someone manifests in a square, we talk about education when PISA results come out, we talk about ornamenting in the territory when the territory begins to burn. And so often we have more adjectives than facts, more insinuations than data, and much more passion than objective evaluation of the proposed measures ", warned.

The President of the Assembly of the Republic also suggested that UTAO could make “the technical analysis of proposals for housing” and say “how many houses were placed on the market after the adoption of a package of measures, or how many were withdrawn, which would calculate how much sales decreased or increased and which would compare these results with those foreseen before the adoption of measures”.

“Politics certainly lost in emotion, but policies gained in effectiveness,” he said.