“From my point of view and that of the government, the main effort has to be to stimulate investment and attract foreign direct investment. They are two sides of the same coin. We have public investment on a good trajectory, but we are tied to very tight deadlines”.

Prime Minister Luís Montenegro, in an interview with Diário de Notícias, promised a recovery “in the next two years” of “a lot of the investment which has been lost in the last eight. Now, investing is the watchword. It is the watchword for those who are here and the watchword for those who look at us from the outside.”

Montenegro explains by saying that, “for those who are here, providing conditions such as tax relief, simplification of licensing and administrative processes, ease of hiring and regulation of attracting human resources from abroad”.

On the other hand, says the leader of the Executive, “for those who see it from the outside, what do we have? We have good investment conditions, investment incentives, company capitalisation policies, and wage appreciation policies, which in themselves imply an increase in productivity, the use of our conditions from the point of view of training, from the point of view of scientific knowledge, from a technological point of view, the equipping of companies with strategic partnerships with the outside, and this is where the issue of security as an economic asset also arises”.

In the same interview, he also spoke about tax relief, assuming that it is “unusual” to predict a deficit of 0.1%. Adding that “if we had a 0.1% deficit problem, any government would solve it in two steps. It's not even a problem, honestly. But at the end of next year, when we talk eventually, we can remove the stubbornness between the government's position and that of the governor of the Bank of Portugal”.