Lisbon, June 17, 2025 (Lusa) - The prime minister said on Tuesday that the PS has, for the first time in the history of Portuguese democracy, the challenge of effectively being a constructive opposition, a role he said had already been played by the PSD in the face of minority socialist governments.
Luís Montenegro was speaking in response to an intervention by the PS's interim parliamentary leader, Pedro Delgado Alves, during the first of two days of debate on the Government Programme in parliament.
According to the government's leader, the Portuguese decided in the last elections that the government should be open to dialogue with all parties with parliamentary representation.
But, according to Luís Montenegro, "it's true that the PS, with the responsibilities it has for its path over the last 51 years of democracy and for what it projects for the coming years, will have an exercise of responsibility that is expected to be different from that of the other parties".
"But that depends more on the PS than on the government," he concluded, before leaving a message for the PS benches.
For the prime minister, in the current legislature, the PS will even have "a historic challenge before itself".
"Perhaps this will be the first time that the PS, in opposition, will be able to give Portugal a demonstration of genuine willingness to collaborate with the government. What has happened over the last few years is precisely the opposite: the PS is always ready to collaborate when the PSD is in opposition, but it has never been ready to do the same, with the same meaning and scope, in the opposite direction," he said.
Earlier, Pedro Delgado Alves had demanded that the government be "clearer" politically about who is the privileged interlocutor in the dialogue with the different oppositions, citing the role of the PS as the founder of the democratic regime and, in an allusion to Chega, the fact that there is a party that wants to establish a "new Republic".
He also warned that the government, by including opposition measures in its programme, cannot see them as a manifestation of dialogue, since, in his view, it is more a question of "unilateral dialogue".
Pedro Delgado Alves also criticised the government for including measures in its programme that were not included in the Electoral Programme of the AD - PSD/CDS coalition, pointing out as examples the revisions to the labour laws and the Bases of the National Health Service, or the concession of railway lines.
"It's true that the Government Programme is not a complete copy of AD's Electoral Programme. It has some concretisations of the principles underlying the Electoral Programme," he added.
Following the exchange of positions between Pedro Delgado Alves and Luís Montenegro, the Chega leader took the opportunity to attack the PS, saying that the Socialists had no concerns about measures not included in the previous government's programme when they joined the PSD to unfreeze politicians' salaries.
"The PS isn't worried about saving the institutions of the regime, it's worried about defending its seats in the institutions," André Ventura accused.
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