4. The most extraordinary arguments have already been heard for not eliminating this phrase: from the idea that a Preamble would never be “unalterable” — that is, it would be more irrevisable than the material limits of revision themselves… —, to its “artistic value”, as if it had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, to its function of condensing an original “Portuguese-style socialism”.
If you use your imagination, there are more arguments, but this is very simple: the introduction of a Constitution must, at all times, be faithful to its content, which was no longer the case with the 1st and 2nd revisions, in which the “…transition to socialism…” and the power “…of the working classes” in the final part of the art. 2nd, in the 1976 wording, gave rise to the search for “…realization of economic, social and cultural democracy…” and “…deepening participatory democracy”.
As a constitutional preamble is not a piece of Archaeology, it is urgently hoped that we can wake up from the “deep sleep” of a past that, fortunately, was not completed: Portugal did not, after all, become a socialist society, no matter how much it cost a minority that has achieved an astonishing and long-lived ability to block the correction of a sentence that makes even the least incautious about the idiosyncrasies of its political-constitutional system shudder.
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