The writer and honorary president of the PS, Manuel Alegre, today considered it urgent to promote a culture of memory, at a time when he said that a deconstruction of democracy based on an “inculture of forgetting” was underway.
Manuel Alegre was speaking at the presentation of his latest book, “Memórias minhas”, at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, before the final speech by the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
With former Prime Minister António Costa and former President of the Republic Ramalho Eanes listening to him in the front row, among other political figures, the historic Socialist and State Councillor warned that we are living in “a difficult time for democracy”.
“This is not a time of democratic euphoria,” he said, before alluding to the American political scientist Samuel Huntington, who argued that April 25, 1974, in Portugal was the beginning of a new democratic era.
For Manuel Alegre, we are currently “far from the time when the Portuguese revolution influenced the democratic transition in Spain and Greece”.
“This is a time of deconstruction of democracy: the far right, populism and xenophobia, forgetfulness winning out over memory. That’s why we urgently need a culture of memory against the inculture of forgetting,” he warned.
Regarding his latest book, the State Councillor said that he wrote his memoirs “without diaries or notebooks”.
“I lived my life without taking notes for posterity. I didn’t write this book to justify myself or to leave a will, but rather as a testimony to a life with several lives throughout its time,” he said.
Manuel Alegre then observed that memory “selects and eliminates”.
“I let my memory flow at the tip of my pen. I was born under a dictatorship and I’m very grateful to be publishing this book on the 50th anniversary of April 25. I’d like to believe that these memories are not just mine, but those of several generations from the 1950s to the present day,” he added.