The president of the Liberal Initiative (IL), Mariana Leitão, will deliver this Wednesday to the prime minister the document “Raise Portugal – Build Now, Conquer the Future“, with proposals for a “demanding and transformative response to a crisis that exposed old weaknesses, but which also opened an opportunity to correct errors, reform the State and prepare the country for increasingly complex risks”. And which include the Amending Budget that Luís Montenegro is still not convinced he will need.
“Without an Amending Budget, the political debate and available solutions are inevitably limited”, argues IL, in the document to which DN had access. So that the response to the calamity is “framed in a clear, transparent and scrutinizable way in the State Budget”, the liberals will propose the beginning of a budget review process to address urgent situations, allowing parties to present proposals with a financial impact this year and that the financial impact of the recovery is framed “in a transparent way”, without transferring to municipal budgets “responsibilities that must be assumed at a national level”.
In the initial part of the document, which the liberals called “Build Now”, direct and simplified support for companies is defended, extending the simple support regime for owners of their own and permanent housing to companies.. The party proposes that this support be used for urgent repairs and replacement of essential equipment that has been damaged by the weather, with priority given to small businesses, “whose budgetary impact is reduced for the State, but decisive for local economic survival”.
On the other hand, IL wants to expand support for the recovery of own and permanent homes for total reconstruction and the existence of tax incentives for investment and reconstruction in areas of the country affected by the storms. It is proposed to create a temporary IRS and IRC tax deduction program for investments in companies, through capital increases and infrastructure replacement.
Other IL proposals undergo a mcompensation mechanism for companies for justified absences of workers during calamities, the tax reimbursement of expenses with fuel for generators and the acceleration of licensing necessary for reconstructionas “bureaucracy cannot worsen the suffering” of families and companies forced to start over from scratch. And this must be accompanied by a Transparency Portal dedicated to responding to the calamity, in addition to regular audits of the implementation of support and the continuous assessment of the effectiveness of the measures, “identifying failures and preventing abuses”.
In another chapter of the document that will be presented by Mariana Leitão to Luís Montenegro, called “Conquering the Future”, IL advocates “moving towards a stronger, more prepared and more capable country”, taking the opportunity to “concrete reforms that have been postponed for a long time”. A reform in territorial management and spatial planning is advocated, “moving from an excessively municipal logic to an inter-municipal and articulated logic” and providing for increased funding for entities that meet defined deadlines and demonstrate capacity for execution and territorial articulation.
On the other hand, IL aims for effective coordination between Civil Protection and the Armed Forcesestablishing binding maximum deadlines for each decision cycle, “ensuring that the State’s response is not dependent on administrative uncertainties”. And the review of the Basic Civil Protection Law, as liberals consider that the successive crises that Portugal has faced in recent years, including the 2017 forest fires, the covid-19 pandemic or the prolonged drought, “revealed that the current legal framework is excessively focused on response and insufficiently oriented towards preventionthat the definition of responsibilities remains diffuse and that evaluation and accountability mechanisms remain fragile”.
For IL, it is still necessary consolidate a National Risk Register, crossing impacts on energy, communications, water, health, digital security and supply chains. But also invest in disaster preparedness that includes safety education in schools and community programs for the elderly population.
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