Leader of CHEGA, André Ventura, has criticised Prime Minister Luís Montenegro’s silence on the housing crisis and recent protests, warning that the government’s failure to respond could act as a “trigger” for a worsening of social unrest in the country.
“But where on earth is the Prime Minister? We haven’t heard from the Prime Minister for days,” Ventura queried today at a lunch hosted by the International Club of Portugal at a hotel in Lisbon.
“He turns up when it comes to football, but doesn’t turn up to resolve housing issues (…) I frankly think this is a trigger for the problem. So, I don’t think it’s just the press; I think we all have a responsibility here to ensure this doesn’t escalate and that we have solutions to put forward,” he went on.
The last time the Prime Minister addressed the issue of housing protests taking to the streets was on Friday in Brussels.
Ventura stressed that if he were Prime Minister (a position he makes no bones about craving), he would already have “addressed the nation”.
When asked by a participant whether disturbances similar to those seen in France could occur in Portugal, Ventura pointed out that France “has a history of violent demonstrations”, which has not been the case here.
But “France has a much higher wage than ours, proportionally speaking; access to housing in France is much easier than access to housing in Portugal, proportionally speaking; the tax burden on income and the effort families make to afford essential goods in France is much lower than ours here in Portugal. If that is the situation there, imagine what might happen here if nobody does anything.”
And then he appealed to the government not to think “that this is some sort of docile country that they will always be able to control”.
Ventura, who has been calling for the resignation of the Minister of Internal Affairs for months, argued that Luís Neves “has lost even more face” because “he said ‘there will be no more tent camps’ and yet yesterday they reappeared…”
After announcing an “emergency legislative package” for housing at the weekend, the CHEGA leader argued today that one of the solutions lies in building more “confidence in the market”.
‘We need investors and property developers to have the confidence to put their properties on the market, tenants to have the confidence to rent, and a justice system that works, because if we continue to have legal cases that take eight, 10 or 15 years to be resolved, we will have no confidence in the market,’ he argued.
In a room packed with businesspeople and diplomats, Ventura denied that Golden Visas contributed to the housing problem (a popular refrain among political commentators) and accused the left-wing of wanting to “catalogue enemies, because these enemies are easily identifiable and because they know that in Portugal there is no culture of investment or market-oriented thinking, and so it is easy to create the impression that there is a housing shortage because some five, six or seven privileged individuals have access to a range of preferential housing funds”.
This was the point where Ventura once again linked the country’s housing problems to immigration, adding that “the problem in Portugal is not having too many rich people; the problem is having too many poor people”.
“This is the logic of the left: the State builds and takes what the private sector has. Our approach must be for the State to preserve the freedom of property ownership, to encourage the supply of homes onto the rental market – to encourage, not compel – to protect people’s property and to create a market that is so dynamic, as happens in other countries, that rents are affordable”.
Ventura’s taking advantage of the PM’s silence to ‘bang CHEGA’s drum’ was only to be expected, as days have passed in which, he has a point, other prime ministers would almost certainly have said something, even if they didn’t go as far as to ‘address the nation’.
Source: LUSA