The Civil Front says the Portuguese state has failed in its fight against corruption this year.

The Civic Front, a civil society organization dedicated to monitoring state power, believes that 2023 represents a failure of the Portuguese state in the fight against corruption and raises suspicions about the government and the President of the Republic.

This Saturday marks International Anti-Corruption Day, which this year coincides with the 20th anniversary of the United Nations Convention against Corruption, a document that Civic Front calls “a magnum opus of international law organizing the fight against corruption.”

The convention covers five areas, including the prevention of corruption, the criminalization of corruption and the functioning of the judiciary, international cooperation, asset recovery, technical assistance and information exchange, and for any of these, the Civil Front understands that 2023 is a demonstration of the “failure of the Portuguese state.”

“This year’s celebration of International Anti-Corruption Day will take place in a context where the government has been sacked due to suspicions of influence peddling involving the Prime Minister’s chief of staff and his best friend, and the President of the Republic himself has been implicated in suspected favoritism. in response to a request from his own son.

Informality, the logic of personal access, the wedge and favoritism have become common forms of exercising power at the highest levels,” the organization criticizes in a statement sent to Lusa.

Vice-President João Paulo Batalha emphasizes that “few governments will pass as many laws on corruption as the three governments of António Costa,” recalling that the National Anti-Corruption Strategy has been created, a new regime for the exercise of political functions and high public position. positions, codes of conduct for public officials and MPs, a questionnaire to assess the fitness of public officials upon taking office, new institutions such as the National Mechanism against Corruption (MENAC) and the Transparency Organization.

He argues that “corruption prevention mechanisms in Portugal are a sham”, the result of “an old logic of legislative hyperactivity” that leads to “the complete ineffectiveness of the processes to prevent and combat corruption”, citing as an example the case of the Transparency Organization, created in 2019. but which four years later “is not installed and is not functioning properly.”

For the Civil Front, there is no real policy of prevention and “every incentive is created for informality, abuse, favoritism and ultimately corruption in the performance of government functions.”

“All this ultimately falls on the shoulders of the prosecutor’s office with weak operational capabilities, which simply cannot cope with the constant flow of cases and suspicions. Even when investigations progress and lead to indictments, especially in cases of major corruption, then the judicial system fails, blocked by the Code of Criminal Procedure, which creates endless opportunities for delaying the delivery of justice. Impunity reigns,” he emphasizes.

He therefore warns that the reality goes beyond isolated practices of corruption and that the country faces “real state capture”, while at the same time that “the dysfunction of the judiciary means that the influence of corrupt businesses will continue for some time.” fine all taxpayers.

For the Civic Front, the celebration of International Anti-Corruption Day demonstrates the “repeated failure of the Portuguese state to effectively prevent and combat corruption”, arguing that it is a failure of state institutions and democracy itself.

In view of all this, and fearing that the next electoral act will lead to an even greater rise of populist parties, the organization defends that all political parties, especially the PS and PSD, “break with the logic of the apparatus, with the permeability of institutions to corruption and the collusion of interests between party power and economic power.”