Montenegro says Costa ‘shows fear’ of SDP and arrogance by saying nothing about TAP

SDP President Luis Montenegro said this Sunday that António Costa “shows fear” of the Social Democrats, as well as “arrogance and contempt”, saying nothing about his government’s TAP-related turmoil of ministers.

In a Twitter post shortly after the broadcast of an interview with RTP PS General Secretary Luis Montenegro wrote that “a prime minister who does not respond to the fears of the Portuguese shows that he is out of his mind.” time”.

“Saying nothing about the riots of the ministers and pretending that the TAR is not like him shows arrogance and contempt for people’s money. Such a big concern for the SDP shows fear,” Montenegro said after a week during which he challenged several times, Costa comments on alleged controversy between various members of the government regarding the legal basis for the dismissal of TAP’s executive presidents and board of directors.

In this interview, the PSD leader asked the PS General Secretary about this requirement, but he avoided the topic, saying instead that he wanted to know “what is the alternative to PSD” for the future of the Portuguese airline.

When asked if he did not understand that he should be talking about the presence or absence of a legal opinion, and if he did not think that there was “confusion” between the ministries on this issue, António Costa did not answer the question directly. .

Speaking in general terms about a parliamentary committee of inquiry into the political protection of the TAP leadership, he defended that the government should not interfere with the competence of other sovereign bodies and that committees of inquiry should not be “tools for political hurling or unless they lose their authority.”

According to António Costa, the PSD president should also “wait for the results” but “he wants to turn every statement into an episode of the week.”

In the same interview, the PS leader also considered that Luis Montenegro did not say what would be necessary to clearly separate himself from Andre Ventura’s party: “Nothing, nothing, nothing with Chega.”

Asked if he was relieved when Luis Montenegro, in a recent interview with CNN, ruled out running or accepting support for “racist, xenophobic, opportunist or populist” parties, the socialist leader and prime minister stressed in that sentence, “don’t say “.

“I didn’t say what needed to be said: there will be no agreement with Chegoy,” he stressed.

The “big problem”, in the words of the General Secretary of the PS, “is not in the dimension of Chega himself, which is already important, but in the fact that Chega conditions and determines the political action of the democratic right.”

In his opinion, “today the SDP often has a behavior, an attitude, a vocabulary that does not correspond to what an institutional party is.”

António Costa cited as an example that the “vice president of the party” – Paulo Rangel – “gave a press conference questioning the visit of a head of state from a brotherly country like Brazil”, and identified “a huge degradation in political debate in the vocabulary, used by the right today.

“Worse than the ambiguous situation is that the whole political position of the SDP, the whole nature of the speech of the SDP on issues of migration, on the functioning of institutions, the vocabulary it uses, reveals the fundamental concern of the doctor of Montenegro, which is that the SDP is not much different for Chegin voters,” argued He.