Analysing procurement policies from party manifestos on the run up to the Portuguese General Election (I)
Like (just) last year, I am once again going to look at the party manifestos of the various parties running in the Portuguese General Election to be held in a couple of weeks. The focus of this analysis is exclusive to their proposals for public procurement - a hot topic in the country with plenty of public pronouncements that the Portuguese Public Contracts Code should be revised top to bottom. It won't happen, certainly not while the Directives are themselves under a revision process and predictably such ideas seem to be out of most of the parties manifestos. Comparing policies from 2024 with the new ones is a fun exercise.
Like last time around, I will be covering the manifestos of the parties currently represented in Parliament with two exceptions. The first one is the Communist coalition which decided to ban my IP from accessing their website. The second, the Left Block which decided to put forward a very short manifesto (16 pages long) bereft of any proposals for public procurement.
I will be doing covering one party a day for the next six days, starting with the coalition forming the outgoing government.
Democratic Alliance (EPP)
The manifesto for incumbent the centre right coalition includes a few proposals for public procurement, but no wholesale changes to the Public Contracts Code. In general, these are fairly high level proposals and frankly even less ambitious than those found in last year's manifesto.
Its main proposal is the creation of a blacklist based on the exclusion grounds of art 55 of the Public Contracts Code and art 57 of Directive 2014/24/EU. This is a new suggestion and one I fear misses the point. Blacklists are really hard to do well as we're about to see in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, more so in a country with a very litigious culture.
The underlying idea is not bad per se, just hard to do well in a country that is yet to fully integrate the various databases and data silos where the information relevant for the exclusions sit. Can anyone knowing Portugal well see the court IT systems feeding in data relevant for exclusions into this blacklist? I do not, so this means that someone somehow will have to manually add names to the list. It is going to be messy and leading to even more litigation.
As I said before in my submission to the public consultation in the revision of the procurement Directives, the way to really enhance the power of the exclusions of art 57 (the mandatory ones) is to force member States to do those checks themselves outside the context of an actual procurement procedure. But my suggestion requires a similar move not only in Portugal but all other member States to make it work cross-border.
The second proposal is a cut down version from one presented last year: improving the national portal to improve 'transparency and competition.' Unfortunately, gone is the (correct) ambition to connect the portal to other national data sources.
The final general proposal is a broad ambition to simplify and speed up a number of public procedures, including public procurement. We are left to guess how this is to be achieved.
Finally, the coalition has some words as well for defense procurement. One of the moves of the outgoing government was a 'strategic alliance' between Defense and Economy (yes, I am not exactly sure what it means either). Apparently there is an intent to use some industrial policy here and to revise the defense procurement rules. It seems this revision is intended only for defense procurement and not the general procurement rules in the Public Contracts Code.
Looking back at last year's manifesto and my comments on it, one of the ideas dropped was that of increasing the specialisation of judges including for public procurement. I said back then solving the real problem (resources more than specialisation) would cost a lot of money. Well, that didn't happen.
The same can be said of the weird suggestion of using the ISO 37001 standard (anti-bribery) in public procurement. It did not happen as I predicted and I guess someone realised it would cut across Art 57 of Directive 2014/24/EU.
In short, the lack of ambition or solutions for public procurement for a coalition with a decent shot at governing the country is worrisome.
Grade: 2/10