The Minister of Finance, Maria Luís Albuquerque, finally has relieved the tension of many a city-watcher by setting a date for the submission of alternative measures to compensate for the lack of cash from the last set of cost cutting measures, rejected by the Constitutional Court.
"The date of presentation of the (new) budget is the 15th of October. I sincerely hope that we can decide on the measures before that. The sooner the better, clearly," said the fragrant one at the end of a gritty Eurogroup meeting.
In recent days several European leaders have warned of the need for the re-budgeting process to be resolved "in two or three months," ie, immediately after ministerial summer hols.
The government says it wants to hear the final decisions from the Court so it can prepare something called a global response, an approach that has the support of European partners but lacks logic in that there then will be zero time left in which to implement any new measures this year, unless there is to be one huge hit before the year end.
The Minister of Finance is aware of the timing issues, "The sooner we know, the better decision we can make because we will have more time to apply any surrogate measures that may be decided."
During yesterday's meeting with her eurozone counterparts, Maria Luís Albuquerque apparently explained the reasons behind the government's decision to forego the final tranche of the bailout money, while recognising that it would have preferred another outcome,
"If you ask me if I would rather not have had this problem and that we completed the programme as planned. I clearly prefer and I think everyone would prefer this, ... but things are what they are and not what we would have preferred them to be."
For Albuquerque, the problem of "having finished the programme in a way that we were not supposed to" has involved risk to the country's credibility. Risks that the government wants to contain by “reiterating that our commitments remain unchanged."
As she says, "things are what they are..."
