Fifty years later, the Constitution still does not belong to everyone

The Constitution continues to be hijacked by those who claim to defend it. Fifty years later, it is still not all Portuguese.

The far left treats it as an untouchable relic. He does not want to review it, he uses it as an ideological trench against a liberal market democracy, in defense of a statist model that the country has already rejected at the polls, but which persists in the constitutional text.

They defend the Constitution not out of love for democracy, but because it still carries a revolutionary spirit that no other European democracy maintains. Paulo Raimundo dispensed with any subtlety when he classified the seven constitutional revisions as “coups”. It is a very serious undemocratic position, which shows the nature of the PCP.

The PS closes the cycle with the hypocrisy that only decades of power teach. He was the protagonist in several revisions. Today, without being decisive for the necessary majority, he discovered that the Constitution is untouchable. The world evolves, becomes more modern, demanding and sophisticated, the PS does not.

If the left wants the Constitution to be frozen in time, Chega represents a different risk. He invokes it to empty it from within, mixing a need for legitimate evolution with measures incompatible with the Rule of Law, as a tactic to force permanent polarization and achieve nothing to change or resolve.

The PSD prefers to postpone. Not because the review is wrong, but because it is more comfortable for you. And yet, a review process would expose each party to scrutiny: the Chega without consistent proposals, the left trapped by ideological prejudice and any radical proposals falling apart at birth. The debate that the PSD avoids is, paradoxically, what suits it most, but which would force the party to define itself without ambiguity and to have, for once, some courage.

The Constitution remains marked by a structural distrust in relation to private initiative. The result is a cumbersome State, a regulatory culture that deters investment and a fundamental law that sides with the State against individual freedom.

IL has concrete proposals: reinforcing private property as a fundamental right, eliminating economic ideological prejudices, introducing intergenerational solidarity and defending rights, freedoms and guarantees (privacy, image,…) in the face of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence. The IL has an immovable red line: no proposal that violates fundamental rights will be acceptable and there is no proposal that can pass without the IL agreeing (each proposal needs two-thirds of the votes).

The left wants a Constitution that places the State above citizens. Enough wants a Constitution that puts security before Freedom, destroying both. IL wants a Constitution that defends every citizen from any arbitrary and authoritarian power, wherever they come from.