The president of the PSD municipal committee in Viseu, Pedro Alves, contested the attribution of responsibility to the previous municipal executive for the non-completion of approximately 26 million euros in investments planned under the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR). The social-democratic leader considered that the current mayor, João Azevedo, is "attempting to rewrite history" by attributing to the previous executive, led by fellow social-democrat Fernando Ruas, the failure to take advantage of EU funding.
Pedro Alves argued that execution difficulties should be analyzed project by project, emphasizing that when the AD Government took office in April 2024, Portugal's overall PRR execution was around 20%. In his view, the difficulties in fund execution were a nationwide problem, resulting from programs and procedures that were "heavily centralized, bureaucratic and complex." The PSD leader rejected the notion that Viseu's situation could be attributed exclusively to lack of planning or projects from the previous executive.
PSD highlighted that many of the investments currently under execution were prepared before the last local elections, and that in the health sector, several procedures had to be repeated due to tenders that received no bids or proposals that exceeded available budgets. The party also contested the use of Family Health Units as an example of the alleged lack of execution, recalling that the current municipality decided not to proceed with some previously planned solutions.
Pedro Alves also criticized the operation to acquire 50 dwellings through a Public Acquisition Offer worth 12.5 million euros, which received nine proposals but resulted in no dwelling being acquired. "At this point, there's no previous executive to blame," he stated. PSD now demands that João Azevedo present a detailed breakdown of the allegedly lost 26 million euros, questioning how much was approved, contracted, or resulted from tenders that received no bids.
