“Only Enough benefits from the discredit of democratic institutions”

A socialist Alexandra Leitão sees with “immense concern, even much” the searches in the cabinet of the national director of the Judiciary Police (PJ), Carlos Cabreiro.

In the programme “The Principle of Uncertainty” CNN Portugal, the jurist and former deputy of the Assembly of the Republic (AR) argued that the PJ was “a police officer who, until relatively recently – before the Luís Neves campaign – was reliable, in whom the citizens trusted”.

For this reason, he sees with “the degradation and loss of confidence that this will certainly bring, with great concern, in a democratic institution that was one of those in which citizens even trusted a great deal”.

And for Alexandra Leitão, “it is not worth looking hard” to realize who are guilty of this disbelief. “There is only one political force that benefits from the disbelief of democratic institutions: it is the Aquira and who is around it. No one else, no more party, no more political force, no more force of society benefits from the discredit of democratic institutions ", shot.

In the opinion of the former Minister of State Modernization and Public Administration, “if there are any suspicions whether any method of investigation was less smooth, less regular, very well, this must be investigated”. “Now, we go back to what happens systematically: it was investigated in the public square,” he emphasized, recalling that “the Public Prosecutor (MP) will search the PJ and everything is known.”.

Something Alexandra Leitão considers “unacceptable”. “In the meantime it has affected politicians – and it affects – it is very serious, it is still a discredit of the institutions, it is unacceptable. But now it affects the PJ itself”.

Therefore, for the socialist, “if there were reasons that justified the searches”, these should have been done with “description, with secrecy, not to create this social alarm”. However, what happened was that “again, they knew the televisions, the newspapers, everything and we have the PJ to be attacked in the public square, a police where the Aquira failed to enter”.

Alexandra Leitão also stressed the importance of the speed of justice in such cases. “Of course, we want Justice to be swift at all times but it is also true that there are processes that, by the social alarm they create, by discrediting the democratic institutions they treat, should be particularly quick,” he noted, giving the example of this case of searches to Carlos Cabreiro’s office, but also of “processes that caused governments to fall and that, even today, after so many years, nothing is known.”.

The former candidate for the presidency of the Lisbon municipality also recalled the “occurrence” in the office of the Acheja in the Assembly of the Republic (AR). “It has been 60 days and the only thing that has come to the public is that it was known from a source that will probably never find out what happened. This is very bad for democracy because, in fact, there are processes that generate so much social alarm and are so serious that they really needed to be quick.”.

“ Curiously, or not, this happens the same day that it was learned that the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry on Luís Neves, which is also going to be the judicial police, will move forward. It's a powerful CPI of Enough. Therefore, it does not need to be approved by the other parties. And I do not think it will contribute at all to the credibilisation of democracy. At the end of the day, these are all things that grow those who do not really have love for democracy and that, in fact, worries me a lot”, concluded Alexandra Leithão.