Lisbon, April 29, 2025 (Lusa) - Portugal's prime minister said on Tuesday that there is always the possibility of improving procedures in crises such as Monday's blackout, but considered that the country's response was "highly positive" and that civil protection "worked very well".
"If you ask me if things could have worked better? We always have time to improve procedures, but I want to point out: Portugal had a very positive reaction to a very serious, unprecedented and unexpected situation," he said.
Luís Montenegro was speaking in the middle of the second extraordinary cabinet meeting in two days, at the prime minister's official residence in São Bento, Lisbon, following the widespread power cut that affected Portugal and Spain on Monday.
When asked about the criticisms of Civil Protection's performance, the prime minister replied that this organisation "worked and worked very well".
Montenegro acknowledged that Portugal's Integrated Emergency and Security Network System (SIRESP) had "anomalies in the functioning", which he emphasised were not new.
"We will carry out a very rigorous assessment of what happened from this point of view so that we can once and for all overcome the communication constraints that the malfunctioning of this system has successively brought about," he said.
On the other hand, the prime minister defended the actions of Civil Protection, saying that a crisis cell was activated "from the first minute in the National Emergency and Civil Protection Authority", which he considered decisive in coordinating the forces on the ground together with the Internal Security System.
Montenegro explained that, in the first few hours, these organisations prioritised "dealing with essential systems and the most critical infrastructures".
"That doesn't mean that Civil Protection and the Internal Security System weren't also concerned about the general public," he emphasised.
From the point of view of government communication, he recalled the two times he spoke to journalists on Monday, as well as the communications of other ministers, such as the Presidency, taking advantage of the broadcasting capacity of radio and, later, television.
Asked if he was in favour, as he was when he was leader of the opposition, of reflecting on the privatisation of REN (Redes Energéticas Nacionais), Montenegro said he had nothing to add at the moment to what he thought at the time.
"It's not now, all of a sudden, that we're going to revive this issue. I'll be available to look into it further, without any problem. I don't think these things should be done in the heat of the moment," he said.
The prime minister used this press conference to assess the normalisation of the electricity supply and the functioning of essential services, stressing that the system was restarted using the country's own energy production.
"The recovery of energy, the reopening of schools and classes, and essential public services are working, and this re-establishment ended up being faster even in Portugal than in Spain," he emphasised.
Montenegro also pointed to the day of the blackout as the first "in the history of Portugal in which disinformation and manipulation have had the dimension of modern times", confessing that he felt frightened because he had received fake news spread under the same banner as credible media organisations.
"More and more, we have to trust the word of the authorities, the word that reaches us through the right channels, the word that reaches us in the right way, the word that reaches us at the right time. There's no point in being in an inordinate hurry to find an answer to everything, because that's the way to open the door to manipulation," he warned.
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