This Friday, the IL president refused to take a position on the state budget after the first “preliminary round” with the government, believing that the document should not be “completely distorted” to please those who are holding the country back.
Leaving the first meeting with the government on the 2025 state budget (OE2025), which Prime Minister Luis Montenegro was absent from due to illness, Rui Rocha considered that these were still “exploratory rounds” and therefore, unlike other parties, IL would not take a position on a document it did not know about.
“The government has a responsibility not to completely distort the budget it is considering in order to completely give in to ideas that will set the country back and harm the people,” he told reporters, stressing that “in many areas Chega is behaving like a completely white man.” PS.
According to Rui Rocha, “this is a balance that the government must find,” but he stressed that it must not “change everything, once again harming the country” and “not create that idea of change that was the reason why the Portuguese also signaled that they wanted to change the government.”
According to the liberal leader, political stability “is not in itself a value that is absolutely imposed on everything else,” and the government should not do without a certain vision in order to have political stability.
“As far as IL’s ambitious stance on reducing the weight of the state and reducing taxes for both people and the economy and companies, covering everyone, my expectations are low,” he suggested.
Among the concerns expressed by Rui Rocha, who was accompanied to the Prime Minister’s official residence by parliamentary leader Mariana Leitão and MP Bernardo Blanco, is the fact that the government discriminates against “people over 35 years old living in Portugal”.
“And we haven’t seen much openness to turning that discrimination into solutions that don’t discriminate against these people financially,” he said.
The structural proposals that the Liberal president put forward at the meeting were the idea of reducing the IRS for everyone, VAT on construction and vouchers for kindergartens, insisting on the “abolition of surcharges that send the wrong signal to the economy” and autonomous taxation.
The “good news” that Rui Rocha found at this meeting with the government was “openness to flexibility of regimes for self-employed workers, independent workers and independent professionals.
On the negative side, the president had “few clues” about what the executive branch was planning in terms of the weight of the state.
Author: Lusa
Source: CM Jornal
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