It was a celebration two days early because the Portuguese Communist Party only turns 102 on Monday, but the message would always be the same: “The fight is fair” from nurses and doctors, teachers and assistants, but also workers and women, whose international day is marked next week.
At a rally to mark the anniversary but also the assembly of the Lisbon regional organization that elected new leaders, the PCP composed the mythical Voz do Operário room and Paulo Raimundo left sharp jabs at the PS and the right-wing parties – all in the same bag, as usual with communists. The secretary general spoke of the millions that economic groups invoice daily – 11 million a day, 7600 euros per minute, he added – and of the political decisions that benefit “their interests and objectives”.
“There are many numbers, many zeros, a lot of mass in the pockets of very few,” he pointed out. Paulo Raimundo. The country’s reality is made up of “inequalities and injustices”, with the rising cost of living, low wages and pensions, poverty and “sacrifices” for workers and for these economic groups “profits are left over”. Like the two million euros a day for the Continente and Pingo Doce hypermarkets, he said, or the “coup” of the privatization of TAP.
“The PS thinks this is fine. PSD, CDS, Enough and IL they think the same; we think this cannot go on”, pointed out the communist leader. “It is by choice that the PS does not depart from right-wing politics and the options” of those four parties. of essential goods, measures for housing and to curb the increase in rents and credit installments.
“The brutal injustice and inequality, the increase in exploitation and the intense attack on everything that is public are marks of the ongoing political, economic and social offensive”, accused the communist leader.
“An unscrupulous campaign against the public sector, public services and public companies” whose objective is “to put a hand in everything that can give them even more profits”. As happens in the SNS, of which the closure of pediatric emergencies is just one example, while private health groups receive 6000 million euros annually. The Government, “by choice, does not respond” and prefers “to strangle, divest and close health services”.
For this reason, defended Paulo Raimundo, “the fight is fair” of health and education professionals and even called, insistently, for “that it be intensified”, remembering this Saturday’s concentrations in Lisbon and Porto and the national demonstration of the CGTP scheduled for the 18th. “The Government has no alternative and will even have to respond to the fair fight that is underway”, warned the secretary general of the PCP.
“We can have the most powerful voice, the best proposal, the most beautiful idea. All this can be very useful. But it needs to be implemented. In the conversation. In the clarification. In the approach. In the recruitment. In the mobilization. In the intensification of the mass struggle. That is what will be the determining factor”, stated Paulo Raimundo, trying to motivate the comrades.
Marking the 102 years of the party, the communist leader also recalled the role of youth and insisted on the idea that during that century “there was no advance or conquest of the workers and the Portuguese people that did not have the initiative, struggle and intervention of the communists “.