Lisbon, Aug. 27, 2025 (Lusa) - The leader of the far-right party Chega, André Ventura, accused Portugal's minister for internal affairs on Wednesday of incompetence in managing the fight against the fires that have affected the country and challenged the prime minister to acknowledge "that he failed" in this matter.
"How can you come here and tell us that everything worked? How can you come here and tell us that you strived, that you did it, that there was prevention, when we know, we saw and we realised that there wasn't and that we are among the worst in Europe in this regard?" asked André Ventura in a speech during the debate in the Parliament's Standing Committee on the situation of the fires in Portugal.
In front of the prime minister, André Ventura recalled that at the beginning of the month, Portugal's minister for internal affairs explained that at the time, Portugal had not yet resorted to the European Civil Protection Mechanism because it had sufficient resources.
"By the 16th, 139,000 hectares of land had burned and Portugal had to ask for support. Prime Minister, this isn't just inattention, this isn't just looking the other way. When you do this, when a minister for internal affairs does this, we know it has a name, it's called incompetence," he said.
The Chega leader also challenged the prime minister not to be like the PS and to assume in this house that he failed, that the minister for internal affairs failed, and to ensure that "none of this incompetence will happen next year".
André Ventura also contradicted statements made by the PSD parliamentary leader, who said that "there is no evidence that the state has failed" in fighting the fires, and advised Hugo Soares to visit the burnt areas to see "what has failed".
The Chega MP said that Portugal has "the largest burnt area in Europe" and is "one of the three worst countries in the European Union in terms of investment in fighting and preventing fires".
"Prime Minister, you can't tell us that it went well, because it didn't," he said, criticising the fact that Portugal doesn't have its own aircraft to fight fires, given the "history of fires" and the "destruction of the forest environment".
"There's no point in going to Pontal to talk about Formula 1, there's no point in going to Pontal to announce great things when everything you do is useless, because we've lost the most useful thing, which is the territory, the land, the people, people's lives. And that's what the prime minister should understand," he emphasised, referring to Luís Montenegro's speech at the PSD's rentrée in the Algarve.
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