IL believes parliament should not be receiving “ally of Putin like Lula” on Liberty Day

Leader of IL (Iniciativa Liberal) Rui Rocha has said today that Portugal’s parliament “cannot receive an ally of Putin like Lula on April 25” – the day the country celebrates 50 years of ‘freedom’ from dictatorship. The situation however appears to be extremely delicate: Mr da Silva will be in Portugal for a Luso-Brazilian summit, and even before he began his inconvenient pontifications, he had been scheduled to address parliament on Liberty Day. Adding to the dilemma is the fact that exactly a year ago, Ukraine’s president Zelenskyy addressed parliament (on April 21). Rui Rocha believes the president, who bestowed the Order of Liberty on President Zelenskyy “cannot be comfortable with the presence of an ally of Putin” a year later.