The VAT for cultural events in Portugal will fall next year from 13% to 6%, of all, except for the bullfighting, according to the state budget by 2019. That is the idea of the socialist Government, but the party do not feel the same. The bulls have opened up a schism between the party and the president of the Government, António Costa, who want to impose the discipline of voting in the parliamentary group.
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The bullfighting are years in the crosshairs of the green party and the Bloco de Esquerda, that a other year may also ask for your ban. Their parliamentary initiatives do not go forward because the PC vote against it, also the right of the CDS, the centre-right PSD and the socialist party that governs.
This year, however, in the search for the largest number of votes for the approval of the last budget of this socialist Government –with parliamentary support of PC and Bloco– the PS, he also received the favourable vote of the only member of PAN (People, Animals, Nature). To change the vote, the Government left the bullfighting out of the VAT rebate.
The minister Retrobet of Culture, Graça Fonseca, in one of his first public appearances, responded to the criticism from the right: “bullfighting is not a matter of taste, it is a question of civilization and therefore the VAT will remain the same, at 13%”.
Fonseca, with zero experience in the cultural sector, raised a wave of criticism in the opposition of the right; but what was not expected is that the enfant terrible of socialism, the verse loose of Manuel Alegre, the great poet, arremetiera against the minister of his own party.
“What here is in cause with his statements”, he has written Happy, “is the freedom of a great tradition of spain. Today are the bulls, after which you will be hunting, and then the book that we may or may not read, or the movie that we may or may not see. This is the kind of intolerance that created the bolsonaros. Attitudes such as these placed the democracy in cause”.
The prime minister, António Costa, replied the poet socialist in another open letter. In it, Costa remembered that you don’t like that the public television broadcast bullfighting, but not prohibited. Costa remembers his friend Merry that freedom also entails respect for those who are in favor of the suppression of the bulls. “You also have to respect citizens who, like me, see bullfighting as a public manifestation of a culture of violence or of animal suffering”.
What I didn’t expect Costa is that in addition to the poet is rebel dozens of municipalities socialists who demand the VAT rebate. And, even less, that yesterday the socialist group parliamentary to submit an amendment to the budget to include the rebate to the bullfighting to 6%.
“I’ve been very surprised with this initiative of the parliamentary group”, has declared the prime minister. “It is a proposal wrong. If it was mp I would vote against you”. Costa dropped to apply the discipline of voting in the group to go ahead with the proposal of the Government budget.
