Government quotes Passos as pointing to economic ‘miracle’ that required ‘a lot of work’

This Thursday, the Deputy Minister for Parliamentary Affairs quoted former Social Democratic Prime Minister Passos Coelho as praising the “miracle” of the economy, the result of the “great work” of Socialist leaders, and asking parties to “not hide in rhetoric” in the budget debate.

At the beginning of the assessment of the specialty “State Budget 2024” (OE2024), Ana Catarina Mendes, who is accompanied on the bench in the socialist government by secretaries of state from different areas of government, noted that this debate is not only about the budget. , “but about the system of protection that the state must provide for the lives of citizens.”

The Socialist quoted former PSD leader and Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho because politics is done “with memory”, a reference that earned a reaction from MPs in the hemisphere.

“Pedro Passos Coelho said on March 1, 2016 that if we could all return salaries, pensions and taxes without money and, in the end, all the bills would come together, that would be fantastic. To be able to achieve your goals, there are either miracles or there are consequences,” he said.

According to Ana Catarina Mendes, the “miracle” in Portugal “is the result of a lot of work” that has been consistently done by her party’s governments, recalling a recent interview with Business magazine Nobel Prize laureate in economics Paul Krugman, who argued that what happened in the national economy was a kind of miracle.

Having listed the increases in wages, pensions and social benefits that OE2024 will bring from January 1, the minister left a call to other parties: “not to hide in political rhetoric.”

“During this month, they have failed to sharply criticize this budget,” he said.