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The President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, entered the last semester of his five-year term today and, under the terms of the Constitution, lost the dissolution power of the Assembly of the Republic.

Article 172 of the Constitution states that “the Assembly of the Republic cannot be dissolved in the six months following its election”, which took place on October 6, 2019, nor “in the last semester of the President of the Republic’s mandate” , between September 9 and March 9, 2021.

Two weeks ago, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa recalled that he would soon be prevented from exercising this power, regarding the approval of the State Budget for 2021, and asked for dialogue with the parties, describing the possibility that in the near future there will be “ a political crisis or the threat of political crisis ”in addition to the crisis resulting from the covid-19 pandemic.

“The President of the Republic is not going to align himself in political crises, so let those who think that, if there is not an effort of understanding, there will be dissolution of parliament in the short time that the President has for that, which is until September 8th, ”he warned.

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In these statements to journalists, at the Lisbon Book Fair, on August 27, the head of state added: “On top of the health crisis and the economic crisis, a political crisis was the total adventure. The alternative would be a term crisis, that is, the President who took office on March 9, whoever he may be, is dissolving for elections in June ”. He concluded: “This does not exist, this is fiction”.

“It is best to take the path that is reasonable, which is to make concessions, negotiate what is necessary to make a Budget feasible, which is not ideal and optimal for anyone, but which is possible for the greatest number, ”he advised.

Elected President of the Republic on January 24, 2016, in the first round, with 52% of the votes, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa sent “there for November” this year the announcement of his decision regarding a possible re-election in the 2021 presidential elections, which he maintained open during its mandate.

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“And, obviously, one thing is certain: any decision that you, as a citizen, will make will always be after the call for elections,” he said last February.

Five years ago, after presenting his presidential candidacy, the former president of the PSD enunciated his reading of the constitutional powers of the head of state in terms of dissolving parliament and forming governments in a speech at Voz do Operário, in Lisbon, on 24 October 2015.

In this intervention, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa promised that, if he were elected, he would do everything he could to “not burden” his successor with “avoidable problems in relation to the powers of the State” and considered it negative for Portugal to live “six, seven, eight months without a Budget. State”.

At the time, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa maintained that “there are no announced dissolutions of parliament – that is, the assessment to be made must take place when the need arises for this exercise or not, and not months or years before”.

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“The President of the Republic must do everything in his power to obtain viable and long-lasting governments, involving State Budgets”, he defended, in that same speech.

Assuming himself as a moderate and a defender of stability, in his first three and a half years of presidential term Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa lived with a minority PS government headed by António Costa supported by unprecedented agreements on the left in parliament and saw the legislature arrive until the end.

In this new legislature, the PS got a reinforced vote in the legislatures of October 6, 2019, but again without an absolute majority, and this time it formed an executive not supported by any written agreements, a condition that the President of the Republic himself considered unnecessary.

After a year at the head of the State, in an interview with Diário de Notícias, the President expressed his desire to never use the so-called “atomic bomb”, thus distinguishing himself from his predecessors elected in democracy, but he enunciated the conditions under which he admitted a scenario of dissolution of parliament and call for early legislative elections.

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“The first requirement is that there is a particularly serious institutional crisis. The second is that it is not possible to find a government within the same parliamentary composition. And the third is that it is plausible, with the data available at that time, that the result of the election will lead to the unblocking of the situation that generated the dissolution ”, he said.

In March 2019, he added another factor that could have led him to exercise dissolution power: the repetition of fires like those of 2017, which caused more than one hundred deaths in Portugal.

“If there were an identical situation in the following year, there would be a dissolution of parliament,” said Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, in an interview with TVI.

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