“Here, I assure all the radicalized and aggressive right: you will not get rid of us. We are here to fight, we are the people of freedom, we are here to win, you will not get rid of us,” warned Mariana Mortágua in her opening speech at the 14th National Convention of the party, which began today at the Casal Vistoso pavilion in Lisbon.
In her farewell address as coordinator, Mortágua considered that to respond to the “attack” from the right, BE “will learn, change, and grow,” building a party “of community and permanent militancy,” creating “unity in struggle.”
“We are on the barricade of the working class for open culture, solidarity, the right to difference, equality between men and women, the right to social security, and the right to care and be cared for at every stage, at every moment of our lives. And we do it because we know it’s possible, that socialism is the politics of hope,” she advocated.
During her intervention, Mortágua also addressed internal matters, warning that BE “has to be stronger and has to recover.”
“And to grow, we have to learn and we have to change. The world has changed, politics has changed. And the Bloco has to change almost everything. And almost everything is not too much,” she alerted.
The deputy emphasized that the party cannot change “the fiber” it is made of—recalling causes such as feminism or the fight against racism—”because in these times, anyone without a strong anchor will be swept away by the current.”
For about 10 minutes, Mariana Mortágua defined BE as the party of “combativeness” and “firmness in political struggle.”
“We are unsubmissive and disobedient. Over the years we have forced them to look women in the eye, all women: those who demand respect for their reproductive rights and do not back down on the right to abortion. Those who speak loudly, who know that life is theirs, who fight and refuse to resign themselves to a place they did not choose,” she emphasized.
Affirming that the members of BE “know who they are,” Mortágua also recalled another flag of the BE, anti-racism.
“We have broken, over these years, icy silences with a simple question no one else dared ask: if there is no racism in Portugal, then why do they continue to kill Black people in poor neighborhoods as they did with Odair Moniz? And beat them with impunity as they did with Cláudia Simões?” she questioned.
Mortágua warned that “almost all battles are yet to be fought,” but confessed she has already tasted “a little, a bit, of the flavor of a mission accomplished knowing that the Public Pension Fund received more than a billion from the additional tax on luxury real estate,” stamped with her surname “and which the right has not yet managed to reverse.”
The deputy also recalled the 335.2 million euros in taxes that EDP was forced to pay to the Portuguese state for the sale of six dams to Engie.
“It was worth it. It is worth it,” she stated.
Targeting the far-right, Mortágua rejected their intentions to end corruption, considering that “they are the guard dogs of the economic regime.”
“The far-right is not the end of privilege and corruption; it is actually the seventh life of that regime, that system, the worst version of all the miseries and violences of society,” she criticized.
Mortágua highlighted that “the oldest trick of authoritarianism is the invention of its own enemy,” warning that the far-right uses immigrants as scapegoats to harm “the working class” and protect “the oligarchy.”
Mariana Mortágua said she hopes that the members of BE will seek “the right questions,” define priorities and alliances, calling for a “clarifying convention” for a “new impetus to the left” in Portugal.
