A beautifully timed vote.winning plan offers hope to Portugal’s 1,168 eradicated Parish Councils that they may be reformed under new rules.
The Parish purge, led by Miguel Relvas under the Passos Coelho coalition government, saw the forced merger of Parish Councils as part of a localised plan to share the pain of austerity while stripping out many local services run by Parishes.
The Government says it wants a new plan for Portugal’s Parishes to be fielded for the next round of municipal elections in 2021. This is designed to win votes.
The Ministry of Internal Administration is finalising a proposal to unravel awkward Parish mergers, as long as yet-to-be-announced criteria are met.
The Socialist administration says this conscious decoupling will not be automatic but that the new law will create a "new legal framework, with new criteria to be fulfilled or verified, that will enable the parishes and their populations, through their local elected representatives, to promote local Parish changes."
Before the Relvas plan there were 4,260 Parish councils. In 2013, this number shrunk by 1,168 in a cost saving exercise.
Internal Affairs Minister, Eduardo Cabrita, said the framework to recreate defunct Parish Councils, or freguesias, will be presented to parliament, "at the beginning of the next legislative session."
The government is passing the buck to local Mayors who will suggest which Parish Councils should be revived. This allows local politics to play a large part in the outcome and denies locals a say in which Parish Councils are keenly missed and which have been merged successfully.
The Ministry won’t be drawn on the criteria to be deployed but will look closely at the findings of a working group which already has reported and recommends five criteria: provision of services to the population; effectiveness and efficiency of public management; representativeness and political will of the population; population, area and physical environment; and history and cultural identity.
These criteria appear to exclude a cost:benefit analysis, and do not mention ‘the will of the local Council mayor’ but the government wants the reorganisation completed in 2021, as the changes will have a positive impact on the Socialist Party's popularity in the 2021 local elections.
