Lisbon, Oct. 18, 2024 (Lusa) - The leader of far-right party Chega said on Friday that the Socialist Party's announcement that it would enable the State Budget for next year did not surprise him. He considered that it put his party at the head of the opposition.

‘We're not surprised that the PS is taking on the burden of governance, supporting the government and enabling this centre-bloc budget,’ said André Ventura.

The Chega leader was speaking to journalists at parliament after the PS secretary-general announced on Thursday night that he will propose to the National Political Commission that the party abstain from voting on the 2025 State Budget (OE2025), both in general and in the final overall vote.

André Ventura pointed out that this announcement ‘is nothing more than the corollary of a process’ identified by Chega ‘whereby PS and PSD were building a joint government together, a central bloc budget’, which led the party to exclude itself from the negotiations around the 2025 budget.

‘It makes perfect sense, with this kind of budget, for the PS to finally, after all the staging it has done for months, assume that it is Luís Montenegro's partner in governance and in this budget,’ he said.

Ventura also said that the negotiation process had the advantage of clarifying ‘who will be supporting the government and leading the opposition’.

‘The man who wanted to unite the left enabled the PSD and CDS budget. At least it's clear who supports the government, as in the case of ‘geringonça’, and who will lead the opposition, which is the case of Chega,’ he said, indicating that he will “start building an alternative” to the PS and PSD.

Ventura criticised the 2025 budget proposal, considering that it is preparing to ‘give with one hand and take away with the other’ and that it announces ‘a drop in income, but at the same time it is going to take money from consumption, transport, diesel and petrol’.

The Chega leader reiterated his vote against, saying that this is ‘a typical PS budget, which Chega could never support’.

Insisting that this is ‘a bad budget in its fundamental principles’, the Chega president also announced that the party will try, in the specialised section, to ‘improve a little on what is bad’ and to ‘enforce the measures that are important for people, that guarantee the balance of the budget, but also that this budget will not be the same as the PS's’.

‘And what I hope doesn't happen is a process of victimisation, again, saying first they wouldn't let us govern, now they won't let us govern the way we want, and therefore we won't accept governing either,’ he appealed, arguing that “the government now has all the political conditions to continue governing”.

The president of Chega said that ‘it is the PS and the PSD who must now come to an understanding’ in order to approve specialised measures.

FM/ADB // ADB.

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