Jose Luis Carneiro Names Four Things the Prime Minister Must Say in Public Before the Socialists Will Even Read the 2027 Budget
No constitutional change without PS and PSD agreement, no touching pensions, an explanation of how post-PRR school and hospital investment gets financed, and an answer on the February storm support. Privatising health or social security is the red line beyond the list.
Hours after Chega's censure motion was voted down in the Assembly on Tuesday evening, the leader of the Socialist Party set out the price of the thing the government actually needs from him. Speaking at the Festas das Vindimas in Palmela, José Luís Carneiro said the PS will not so much as open the 2027 State Budget proposal until Luís Montenegro answers four questions in public.
Two of them are demands. The first is a commitment that there will be no changes to the Constitution without agreement between the PS and the PSD. "He has to commit publicly with the PS that there will be no changes to the Constitution on which the two founding parties of the democracy are not in agreement," Carneiro said. The second is pensions: "We want to be the guarantee of the security of pensioners and of pensions."
The other two are questions about money
The remaining two are requests for an explanation, and both point at the gap opening up after the Recovery and Resilience Plan winds down. Carneiro asked how the government intends to finance the investments it has promised in schools, hospitals, health centres and social facilities, "given that the government left many of those projects unexecuted" under the PRR.
The fourth concerns the storms of February this year. The Socialist leader wants to know how the executive will deliver the support it announced to companies, families and municipalities in the affected areas. It is a pointed choice of subject: the President has spent much of his first six months on the same file, and the state's slowness in getting storm money out of the door has been one of the few areas where Belém has criticised the government by name.
Only after the Prime Minister gives what Carneiro called "a clear word" on all four will the Socialists look at the budget proposal itself.
A red line beyond the four
Carneiro added a warning that sits outside the list and is broader than any of it. "Let us imagine that the government took decisions on the privatisation of health, on the privatisation of social security, and gave budgetary backing to those measures. Then of course we could not allow a State Budget proposal to pass under those conditions."
The arithmetic behind all this has not changed since the Socialists opened their autumn campaign in Olhão in mid-August. The AD coalition cannot pass a budget on its own, and the only two routes through the Assembly run via Chega or via a PS abstention. The government has said it will meet every party at the end of this month, and the proposal has to reach parliament by 10 October.
And a verdict on Tuesday
Asked about the censure motion, which was rejected with only Chega voting for its own initiative, Carneiro was blunt about the party that filed it. Chega, he said, "lives off crises and off mobilising discontent and people who are resentful of democracy". He described the scenes in the chamber as "a sad moment" and said Chega's deputies had behaved like a football terrace rather than parliamentary representatives, failing to respect the ruling of the Speaker.
That motion was the 37th of Portuguese democracy, and like 35 of the 36 before it, it failed. The budget vote in late October is the one that can actually bring a government down, and Carneiro has now published his terms for it seven weeks early.
