More mud swirls in Portugal’s political crisis

PM “wanted parliament dissolved”; President didn’t

More mud is swirling today, in the wake of the prime minister’s extraordinary announcement last night.

Miguel Albuquerque, president of Madeira’s regional government, has revealed that actually the PM wanted President Marcelo to ‘dissolve parliament’ and call early elections.

Albuquerque predicts “the situation of governmental degradation will remain, and the situation of political instability will remain” except now the government has the added disadvantage of keeping a minister in place “who doesn’t have the confidence of the president”.

Miguel Albuquerque threw in his take of the mainland’s political meltdown at an employment and training fair in Funchal this morning.

“The president is not interested at the moment in dissolving parliament because there is a great risk”, he explained. So, the PM, who “wanted that dissolution” and presumably wants early elections, is not going to get his wish.

Much more importantly, Miguel Albuquerque predicted what most people expect: “the merry-go-round of big and small ‘cases’ will continue until the end of the inquiry into TAP because there is still a lot to be discovered…” This perhaps being another reason for Mr Costa ‘wanting parliament to be dissolved’. If parliament was dissolved, the TAP inquiry would dissolve with it – and all the inconvenient truths of others would no longer have an outlet.

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