Montenegro had a terrible week. And it will only get worse, says Politico

Luís Montenegro tries to control the storms that are causing devastation across the country while expanding an investigation into fraud involving his vacation home.

The calamity situation that Portugal is going through and the political moment in which it occurs did not go unnoticed by , who writes this Friday that the Portuguese Prime Minister “had a terrible week — and it will only get worse”.

According to the Berlin-based English-language newspaper, Luis Montenegro is under pressure due to the way the government handled with the storms that caused devastation across the country for several weeks.

At least 16 people died as a result of the violent cyclones that hit the Atlantic country since the end of January, destroying homes and leaving thousands of people without electricity for days, the newspaper notes.

One, which serves as the country’s main north-south axis, was destroyed after a dike collapsed this week, and the rail link between Lisbon and Porto is suspended.

Coimbraa city that, as Politico recalls, is home to one of the oldest universities in Europe, could force the evacuation of up to 9,000 residents.

The growing indignation over the lack of preventive measures taken before the storms, as well as delays in emergency response and recovery operations, led the Minister of Internal Affairs Maria Lucia Amaral on Tuesday.

“I no longer meet the personal and political conditions necessary to perform the position”, he wrote in his resignation letter, which the President Marcelo Rebelo de Souza accepted immediately.

Opposition parties on both sides of the political spectrum took advantage of Amaral’s sudden departure tocriticizing the prime minister center-right.

Andre Venturaleader of the far-right Chega party, accused Montenegro of having “lost control of its own government”, while José Luís Carneirofrom the Socialist Party, stated that the dismissal proved that the executive “failed in its response to this emergency”.

Himself Montenegro provisionally assumed the portfolio de Amaral to personally oversee crisis response operations.

Although the decision intends underline the prime minister’s commitment in dealing with disaster, it is also politically riskysince it is now directly associated with the management of the calamity, considers Politico.

Numa attempt to calm citizensMontenegro announced Thursday that its government will use EU recovery funds to rebuild devastated communities and present a new water management plan and forests which, he said, will prepare the country for the extreme weather conditions it will face over the next 25 years.

Fraud investigation

The Prime Minister’s message, however, was undermined on Friday, when he was associated with a tax fraud investigation ongoing, notes Politico.

According to Portuguese weekly Expresso, prosecutors have been standing between the cost of Montenegro’s holiday home and the invoices issued by its contractors since last autumn.

Although has not been named as a target investigation, the news constitutes a unpleasant distraction for the Prime Minister.

Last year, the Prime Minister called early elections after a unrelated corruption investigationinvolving his family’s business, led him to lose a vote of confidence in Parliament.

This process ended up being archived by prosecutorswho found no evidence of criminal activity, notes the newspaper.

The house in question in the most recent investigation had already been the subject of a criminal investigation in 2024when prosecutors raised doubts about the tax benefits that the prime minister had claimed. The case was dropped after authorities concluded that Montenegro had legally right to benefits.

So far, these investigations have apparently resulted in, as Politico calls them, “unpleasant distractions“, it is not clear what leads the newspaper to consider that the scenario “will only get worse” — unless it has access to information that is not yet public knowledge, be it judicial or meteorological in nature.