Lisbon, Aug. 22, 2025 (Lusa) - Livre MP Paulo Muacho on Friday criticised the government's "reactive stance" on the fires and considered Portugal's minister for internal affairs to be weakened, while the BE pointed to the government's "lack of awareness".
"The government needs to stop being reactive to this situation. We need to understand what is being done to improve firefighting and fire prevention, [...] why the government is slow to convene the National Civil Protection Commission, and we also need to know what is being done on the ground when the fires are put out, particularly concerning emergency soil stabilisation," he said.
Speaking to journalists at parliament, the MP said that "when situations like this happen, ministers are always weakened".
"We have the loss of human lives, we have homes at risk, villages at risk, protected areas on fire, we have a situation that is a catastrophe and in which it is also clear that there is a failure in the response that the state is giving and, therefore, naturally this weakens the minister and weakens the entire government and weakens the state as a whole, and that confidence that people have in the actions of the state," he said.
Asked if the minister for internal affairs, Maria Lúcia Amaral, is fit to remain in office, the MP said that this "is an assessment that the minister herself will have to make", considering that it is necessary to solve the problems and not just have a "reactive stance".
He added that the government should have used "all possible means" to respond to the fires and pointed out that declaring a state of calamity "could be useful" because of the "legal possibilities it opens up for the government".
As for the support announced by the government on Thursday, Livre argued that it should reach the ground "as quickly as possible, with the clearest possible communication and information, involving the local authorities and mayors who know the area, and with as little bureaucracy as possible".
Paulo Muacho announced that Livre had presented proposals today, including the recognition of the firefighting profession as a job that wears out quickly, and the creation of "a professional career for firefighters within the scope of humanitarian firefighting associations".
Also speaking to journalists in parliament, the BE's coordinator, Mariana Mortágua, accused the government of "a lack of awareness of people's distress in the fires", adding that the "reaction to the fires, the preparation, organisation and deployment of resources was delayed".
Mariana Mortágua also called for "support to reach the people in good time", and regretted the government leader's preoccupation with "quantitative accounting of measures".
"In the rush to count more and more measures, some that don't even make sense, such as the issue of user charges, which are no longer charged, but which are announced as a great benefit given to the population," she criticised.
In a statement sent to the press, the JPP MP recognised the need for support for "those who have lost everything or almost everything", but regretted the lack of preventative measures.
Filipe Sousa said that the government "continues to react to the tragedy instead of anticipating it" and considered that "if there isn't the courage to invest in prevention, in a year's time we'll once again be counting houses destroyed, jobs lost and human lives taken by fire".
In a response sent to Lusa, PAN considered that the measures announced "can be seen as a smokescreen for what has been the government's inertia" in fighting the fires, and advocated "more agile and less bureaucratic" support for the population.
The party also regrets that the government is looking at the forest "only from an economic perspective", advocating investment in native forests, and criticises the late activation of the European civil protection mechanism and the government's refusal to declare a disaster, recalling the number of deaths of people and animals and thousands of hectares of burnt forest.
FM/ADB // ADB.
Lusa
