The president of the PSD, Luís Montenegro, demanded this Wednesday that the Secretary of State for Civil Protection apologize to the Portuguese for having said that, given the “seriousness of the climate”, the area burned this year should be 30% greater.
We demand an apology from the Portuguese, from the families who are currently suffering from this scourge and also from the many thousands of people who are on the ground fighting forest fires”, said the Social Democratic leader, referring to the fact that the minister’s statements exemplify “the state the government is inside”.
“The government is in a freewheel. The members of the Government are saying absolutely unheard of things and that we understand with great perplexity and astonishment”, he added, in statements to journalists.
In an interview with SIC Notícias, on Friday, the Secretary of State for Civil Protection said that the “algorithms and data say the burned area” should “be 30% higher”, considering that, “despite the complexity, the device has been responding well”.
To tell the country, at a time when so many people are suffering on the ground, that after all everything is going more or less well, because it was calculated that it should still have burned 30 percent more than it already burned, because there is a mysterious algorithm in the Ministry of the Interior, in reality it is a perplexity”, observed the Social Democratic leader, to conclude: “There is a great disorientation in the governmentas a result of what happens in other sectors”.
Luís Montenegro visited the 41st edition of the Vale do Sousa Agricultural Fair — Agrival, in Penafiel, in the Oporto district, which runs until Sunday with about 350 exhibitors.
The party leader also lamented recent statements by the agriculture minister after the Portuguese Confederation of Agriculture (PAC) demanded more support from the government for the sector to face the difficulties caused by the drought.
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Luis Montenegro expressed: “The Minister of Agriculture, faced with a legitimate complaint from the sector and from one of the most representative confederations, went so far as to say: these gentlemen should be explaining why apparently during the electoral campaign they appealed not to vote for the PS“.
For the president of the PSD, with this type of statement the Government is “in freewheeling, where everyone says what they want and nothing happens”, while, he continued, “the prime minister is undaunted and serene seeing the degradation of credibility, authority, respect and some humanism for those who exercise public functions“.
Regarding CAP’s claims, the Social Democratic leader said that the PSD proposes the adoption of measures equivalent to those that are taking place in Spain, “What makes the agricultural sector competitive”.
In particular, Montenegro defended “extraordinary aid for access to factors of production, such as fuel and electricity and others, such as fertilizers and various products that are currently inflated, depending on what is happening in the market in general. ”.
Source: Observadora
