Pedro Delgado Alves turned his back on Aguiar-Branco. The “cliché” and the “lack of respect”

PS deputy explains stance at April 25th session. Hugo Carneiro defends president of the Assembly of the Republic.

It was one of the moments that marked , last Saturday: after José Pedro’s speech Aguiar-Branco, Pedro Delgado Alves turned his back.

The PS deputy did not like the words of the President of the Assembly of the Republic about the transparency and the functioning of institutions.

Aguiar-Branco criticized the increase in laws to limit the exercise of political positions, on incompatibilities and impediments applied to political office holders: “Populist remedies do not open politics, they close it. Populist remedies do not popularize politics, they make it more elitist.”

Criticized the “buzzwords” used to combat political reputational problems. These platitudes, he claimed: ““It is necessary to combat conflicts of interest; We need to put an end to revolving doors, we need to demand transparency, we need to put an end to the shameless perks of politicians.”

“Suddenly, Discussing the increase in politicians’ remuneration became a prohibited subject. A topic we don’t talk about, because it’s not popular. We have forgotten an old democratic principle, which dates back to the times of Pericles, that public service, to attract the best and to be accessible to everyone, rich and poor, must pay well”, he warned.

“We wanted to end the doors swivels, because, imagine, it was unacceptable for someone to go to work in the private sector after having been in public service”.

“We wanted to end the conflicts of interest and we created a regime of incompatibilities that, in practice, makes it impossible for someone to protect the area they know and have worked in their entire life”.

“It wasn’t enough declare income. It was necessary to publicly declare whether the wife or husband is rich, whether the cousin is poor, whether the stepson is a businessman. If the house has an elevator, how many bathrooms, if there is a loan, if the loan is with a fixed rate, if it is subsidized”, continued the president of the Assembly.

Aguiar-Branco said that, in many situations, political life has become a “reality show”.

Turned back

Pedro Delgado Alves got up and stood costas, after the speech.

On Saturday, the PS deputy said that Aguiar-Branco “devalued the work that has been done over many years to guarantee the transparency and functioning of institutions, he caricatured the way transparency control works, the incompatibilities, the revolving doors – something that is required by society as a way of giving credibility to the exercise of public functions, he mixes things that are of public interest with private interest, he did a disservice in the intervention he made today”.

The socialist admitted that he may have taken more “personally” that subject because he has “worked a lot on these topics”. And do you think Aguiar-Branco spoke in a way “jocose.”

Already this Monday. Pedro Delgado Alves reinforced: “José Pedro Aguiar-Branco’s intervention devalued the importance of the topic, reducing it to the category of buzzword, and contributed to misinformation about the law, caricaturing it and presenting examples that do not correspond to the current regulations, legitimizing the narrative of a retreat in transparency in public life”.

“If the idea was to promote a debate about the credibility of the political class, the starting shot was fired in the foot”, argues the vice-president of the PS parliamentary group.

He is aware that his protest did not please everyone, but he explained: “Not reacting to a moment when the quality of Democracy is threatened (precisely on the day we celebrate it) would be failing to represent the people who have been fighting for years for the transparency of public life”.

“Lack of respect”

Also this Monday, Hugo Carneiro classified this protest as a “lack of respect”.

On Observador radio, the PSD deputy assured that Aguiar-Branco “is not against transparency”, arguing that there is “a tangle of rules that keeps the best people away from politics.”

Hugo Carneiro thinks that political office holders should not declare to the State information that the State already has: “If a politician owns a property, a vehicle or a bank account, the State has that information”.

“His entire personal life appears in every newspaper. This promotes voyeurism and we cannot promote it. We have a total voyeurism where everything has to be public”, he added.