The second day of the budget debate began, as is customary, at ten in the morning to begin voting and the proposals for reforms to the OE scheduled for that day were debated, but it was 11:30 a.m. and the subject The burning one continued to be the one from the previous day: the deep alteration that the PS made to a proposal that had already been debated and that the opposition claimed to have entered against the rules of the game. The issue was taken up by all the benches, not because of the content but because of the form, which the opposition assures is already an authoritarian tic of the socialist majority. Result: what was about to happen in the morning continued until the afternoon.

What was at stake? Proposals for amendments to the Budget had to be presented before May 13. Then, during the specialization, the parties can make replacement proposals, with simpler changes than the one that appeared in the PS’s proposal on the Municipal Social Fund and the increase in the debt margin, where a completely new article appears. The opposition understood this as an alteration and not a replacement of a proposal and that, even more, it had not been debated in its new molds.

“It is a dangerous precedent that the PS wants to set because today it has an absolute majority. If I didn’t, I would never want to open it. And it is that we have an absolute majority that we cannot allow it”, said the deputy of the BE Mariana Mortágua. Paula Santos, from the PCP, added that they are not “just a question of practice, there is a change in the proposal. We cannot allow the absolute majority of the PS not to enforce the rules. With the absolute majority and these abusive attitudes, there are no rules that apply”.

Filipe Melo, from Chega, called it “a kick in the regiment” and, in the PSD, Paulo Mota Pinto insisted that the change brings “a completely new article”, subverts the normal deadlines for submitting changes and wants to vote on a proposal that was not discussed by the deputies.

Meanwhile, the PS guaranteed that it was complying with the regulations of the Assembly of the Republic and the parliamentary leader Eurico Brilhante Dias said he was even “surprised” by the refusal of the Budget and Finance Commission to accept the replacement proposal.

The debate did not stop here and grew to involve the President of the Assembly of the Republic. Augusto Santos Silva put resources and decisions to the vote, admitting, at the end of it all, the Board’s proposal to the sound of an ironic “oohhhhh” from the Socialists. Pedro Filipe Soares, from BE, asked for the floor to point out that “from the moment the Table [da Assembleia da República] participates in this process of arrogance of the PS is saying that it lacks the independence that it guaranteed it would have, in the inauguration speech of the Assembly of the Republic”.

And before him, Paulo Mota Pinto had already told Santos Silva not to remain calm with the guarantee of “application of the same criteria in the future, because it is rather a lack of criteria in favor of the steamroller of the absolute majority.” . We did not expect this from the Assembly of the Republic”, fired the parliamentary leader of the PSD.

The prosecution ran all the opposition and sometimes even with the same words. André Ventura, for example, returned to the image of the “majority compression roller”, used by the PSD, to describe what happened.

In the PS, Brilhante Dias defended himself as best he could, resorting to victimization: “This majority will not prevent any parliamentary group from appealing the decisions of a committee to the plenary session” —this is because the PS had requested an appeal to the plenary session of the rejection of the proposal by the parliamentary committee. The “so-called steamroller is the democratic will of the Portuguese to say that this parliamentary group has the right to appeal to the plenary of the decisions of the commissions,” the Socialist also responded to the accusations that reached the other benches.

In the end, the proposal was only voted against by three benches, but the PS was isolated in the vote in favor, in a form of protest by some parties, such as the PSD, which did not oppose the content (which will give more room of indebtedness to the municipalities), but to the way in which the socialists raise the issue.

The long discussion on a topic that had already been discussed ended up having a collateral effect: the delay in the agenda of the entire day of the budget process. Santos Silva ended up deciding to work and ordering the deputies to have lunch at 1:20 p.m., which means that the entire debate was left for after 2:30 p.m. —already close to the time in which the second part of the day takes place, the vote. , it should start.

The promised hospital and a dictionary page.

The second stone in the gear of the debate came in the middle of the afternoon, while the deputies debated proposals on Health. From the outset, the opposition attacked the PS with two classic issues: the lack of family doctors, to which the Government responded by recalling that the last Executive of the PSD also promised a family doctor for every Portuguese, showing that neither one nor another complied. until you see the promise and guarantees about the construction of new hospitals throughout the country, from Sintra to the Algarve.

Regarding the promised and postponed hospital in the Algarve, there was a guarantee from the Secretary of State for Health, António Lacerda Sales: at the end of the third quarter of this year, the conditions will be met to finally proceed with the work – promised since 2006.

But it was also with Lacerda Sales that the atmosphere heated up again. With the deputy of Chega, Pedro Frazão, launching strong attacks against the Government and “Doctor Sales”, the benches became more agitated until they reached the kicking stage, when Frazão accused the “caviar socialists” of being “hypocrites”. .

A few defenses of honor later the most unexpected moment of the day would take place: the services of the Parliament began, at the request of the PS, not to distribute the usual information and graphics to contextualize the interventions, but copies of a printout of the online dictionary Priberam. The chosen definition? The word “hypocrite”. Shocked, the PSD’s parliamentary leader, Paulo Mota Pinto, picked up the sheet and accused the PS of “playing with the Portuguese.”

And the leader of the socialist caucus, Eurico Brilhante Dias, responded: the PS keeps its promises and had promised to teach Chega the meaning of the word hypocrite. Said and done, to the perplexity of the Social Democrats.

The sheet distributed in plenary

Menstrual leave heated up the debate. “Pacóvio is being macho”

The other issue that was worth discussing in Parliament was another of the issues that had already been coming up since Monday: the proposal for three days of menstrual leave, raised by the PAN. The left even agreed, but wanted the license to be paid for; Inês Sousa Real was willing to leave the details to the regulation; but the biggest clash happened again with Chega, more precisely with the only deputy on the bench, Rita Matias.

Rita Matias was responsible for the attack on the PAN, accusing the deputy of presenting signs of “bacoco feminism” and even of creating a new factor of discrimination against women in the workplace.

Sousa Real got angry and fired several shots at Matías, saying that “Pacóvio is being macho”, accusing Chega of “disregarding women’s rights” and ended as follows: “Before having a [deputada, já que é a deputada única do PAN] and have values ​​that are in line with the values ​​of the 21st century that maintain the values ​​of God, country and family of the times of the other lady”. The diatribe earned him the applause of the PS and the Bloco de Esquerda, but the proposal still failed.