Augusto Santos Silva said that we are currently living in “very difficult circumstances”.

The president of parliament also said that the origin of the current crisis “is not political”, and that the Government resigned “not because it has lost the confidence of parliament, the institutional solidarity of the President or the support of the population or the party”.

“But rather because parliament was dissolved, because the President of the Republic understood that, by resigning the prime minister, the parliamentary majority did not have the right to propose an alternative prime minister,” he said.

For Santos Silva, this crisis “arose unexpectedly” and the “common people”, including PS activists and voters, “are, firstly, very surprised and perplexed, secondly scared, while are disappointed, others even angry.”

“And, therefore, we run the risk of moving from political stability, the political tranquillity that the country was experiencing, to exactly the opposite: to a situation of unrest, instability, in which people may lose a lot of the trust they have in us”, he warned.

Santos Silva thus maintained that, in this context, it is necessary to “show credibility, consideration, look at all sides, consider all variables at the same time” and “show humanity”.

Warning

Santos Silva warned that, in the current scenario, “there is a huge, big risk - it is better not to hide it or devalue it - which is the risk that the country could wake up on March 11th with a political situation in which the solution of the Government presented to it, is a solution dependent on the extreme right”.

“That extreme right that thinks that the blood of the Portuguese cannot be contaminated with the blood of Cape Verdeans, that thinks that foreigners are here to steal our Social Security, that the Portuguese can be divided into good and bad”, he said.

For Santos Silva, “the only guarantee there is for the country not to become dependent on the blackmail of this force is to vote for the PS party”.