The start of the debate on the State Budgets for 2023 brought back to Parliament an exchange of accusations about the paternity of austerity, between PS and PSD. On the right, Chega said that he was fed up with Canal História, but the PSD went even further back in time to attack António Costa’s government since he first entered government. To do this, he turned to Ana dos Olivais, the unlikely protagonist of the first day of debate marked by strong attacks from the left and a friendly atmosphere with the new government partners.

Austerity was a weapon against the PSD, which IL and Chega defended

Who first touched the nerve of austerity was the leader of the parliamentary caucus of the PSD, preventively. He questioned the prime minister and immediately warned that he did not want Costa to be “repetitive and predictable” in his response. “There is no talk of the right and austerity because in the last 27 years the PS governed 20” and “it was the PS that in 2011 brought austerity and the troika.”

Eurico Brilhante Dias, on the side of the PS bench, thanked him for the pass and immediately remembered who was in the front row in the Passos Coelho era: the current leader of the PSD, Luís Montenegro. He made a long description of the failures in the forecast of the public debt of that Government, to explore the “wrong accounts of the PSD”. “It is that correct accounts are not austerity, but austerity has never brought and does not bring correct accounts”, he threw at the Social Democratic caucus.

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