“I never fear receiving a call from the president”

3 May. (EUROPE PRESS) –

The Prime Minister of Portugal, António Costa, has tried to turn the page on the political crisis opened by his public discrepancies with the President, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, on account of the continuity in the Government of the Minister of Infrastructure, Joao Galamba, accused of hiding supposedly information related to the airline TAP.

“I am never afraid of receiving a phone call from the President of the Republic. It is always a pleasure,” Costa said this Wednesday, in statements to journalists from Braga, the city to which he has transferred his entire cabinet and from which he has defended that politics is “much less fiction” than it seems.

“Things that were decided yesterday, were decided yesterday”, he has sentenced, trying to settle the controversy opened by the fact that he rejected the resignation of Galamba, indirectly linked to a secret meeting within the framework of the parliamentary commission on the management of the airline.

The President of Portugal reacted to Costa’s refusal to accept the minister’s departure with an unprecedented statement in which he appealed to the “compelling reasons” given by Galamba, “related to the perception that citizens have of political institutions.”

For Rebelo de Sousa, who has no room to act except at the initiative of the prime minister, it is a “deplorable” situation. Thus, he has recognized that he “disagrees” with Costa’s position and his “political reading of the facts”, understanding that the “prestige” of the institutions is also at stake.

The crisis has also revived the calls of the opposition parties for the advancement of legislative elections, although the Socialist Party (PS) governs Portugal with an absolute majority and has always made it clear that it has no intention of forcing any call.