A scheduling fight before the debate

On Wednesday, 21 October, the Assembly of the Republic in Lisbon took up an urgent debate on housing that Livre had requested. Speaker José Pedro Aguiar-Branco had refused to schedule it twice, arguing that the request did not respect the chamber's procedural principles. The PS, the rest of the parliamentary left, Liberal Initiative and Chega then voted together to force immediate scheduling, leaving the PSD and CDS isolated in the vote. The PSD parliamentary leader, Hugo Soares, accused the PS of putting political convenience ahead of the rules, and he said the vice-chair of the PS group, Pedro Delgado Alves, had backed the speaker's reading that a fortnight must pass after the last urgent debate before another is held. Soares went further in his speech.

“The PS members are not for legality; they are for their own political and party convenience. For them the law is a blank slate when it suits them.”

Delgado Alves replied by questioning the speaker on whether he had admitted Chega's constitutional revision bill, which he said had been withheld from the Republic for four months.

Open doors or market overheating

The central dispute was who bears responsibility for the housing crisis. PSD and Chega put the blame on socialist policies of "open doors" to immigration. PS and Livre pointed instead to market overheating measures adopted by the government and backed by Chega. The PS reminded the chamber that house prices kept rising through 2025 and 2026, years in which the right has governed. Ventura went further and said that Livre, the PCP, the Bloco de Esquerda and the PS had let 1.5 million people into Portugal in the last years, in a country of 10 million inhabitants. He asked how the left had allowed so many people in.

Clashes between Livre and Chega

The sharpest exchange was between Livre co-spokesperson Jorge Pinto and Ventura. Pinto said Chega had been pushed "against the ropes" by voters after it signed an agreement with the PSD to revise the tenancy law. He accused the government and the PSD of belligerent rhetoric toward people who had protested peacefully in the streets of Porto and Lisbon, and said Liberal Initiative had belittled those demonstrators. He called Chega's stance the "supreme hypocrisy" in the same speech, and then put the core of Livre's position to the chamber.

“What the Assembly of the Republic must do is be the voice of those who in the streets ask us for solutions to their real and concrete problems.”

Ventura answered in the same debate and rejected the charge outright. He said Livre wanted to occupy other people's houses rather than find a solution to housing, and he pointed to Livre's own record in the chamber.

“There is no greater hypocrisy than Livre talking about housing when in this same Assembly it voted against cutting VAT on construction.”

The government's position

The minister for parliamentary affairs said the government understood the "anguish" felt by Portuguese citizens who suffer because of housing, but warned that it does not recognise "popular assemblies". The remark came in a debate shaped by the housing protests, which parties on both sides invoked to justify their positions. The exchanges were marked by a raised tone and frequent interruptions, and several decisions were taken against the will of the Assembly's president. The debate ended with the two camps still assigning blame to each other.