Waffling Portuguese MPs face having mics cut off

MPs who have a tendency to waffle will be made to keep it brief or face having their microphones cut off under a new “traffic light system” aimed at keeping order in the Portuguese parliament.

MPs will be faced with visual warnings and the colours green, amber and red to indicate how much time they have left to speak.

When an MP sees green change to amber, they know they have only 30 seconds left. When it is red, they’ll be given an extra 15 seconds before their microphone is cut off.

The system was due to be tested for the first time in Friday’s session of the single-chamber parliament in Lisbon but without microphones being turned off.

José Pedro Aguiar-Branco, the parliamentary speaker, announced the test earlier this week, saying that he was sure it would “please MPs”.

The move comes after ill-tempered debates in Portugal’s parliament over claims by the hard-Right Chega party that the country’s social fabric was being damaged by high levels of immigration.

There were howls of protest and interruptions from MPs from various parties last week as one Chega MP said that crime committed by foreign residents was up by 300 per cent, a claim not backed up by any official statistics.

Chega, which finished third in March’s general election with 18 per cent of the vote, proposed that immigrants should not receive government benefits for five years after arriving in the country, even if they are contributors to the tax system.

During another heated debate in May the speaker warned MPs that he has the power to stop MPs from speaking if he believes they are out of order and even call the police to remove them if necessary. All parties supported this measure, except for Chega.

Mr Aguiar-Branco said he expected to hold a second trial of the “complete system” before the summer recess, so that the mic-cutting traffic light technology can be applied as standard for all parliamentary debates from September.

He also said parliament was studying how to replicate the traffic light system with sound warnings after Ana Sofia Antunes, a Socialist Party MP who is blind, pointed out that she could not be guided by coloured lights.