During a session in Montemor-o-Novo, Évora district, the PCP leader stated that the government’s program, which began to be discussed on Tuesday in the Assembly of the Republic, “is an affront to the difficult lives of the majority” of the population.
“And it is a declaration of war on those who work, who create wealth, who make the country and the economy function,” added the secretary-general of the PCP at the presentation of the CDU candidates for Montemor-o-Novo in the upcoming municipal elections this year.
According to Paulo Raimundo, the program by the AD executive, led by Luís Montenegro, which the PCP has already announced it will present a motion of rejection against, “insists on an old, worn policy with no results, the policy of low wages.”
“It is the program that, if it were up to the will of the prime minister, envisions the national minimum wage in 2029 at a value lower than what is already paid just next door, in Spain,” he criticized.
It is a program “committed to exploitation” and “more job insecurity,” whereas job insecurity “means insecurity in life.”
Therefore, the government’s AD (PSD/CDS-PP) program serves “to make us work more hours, more time, and to deregulate working hours even further, as if they were not already sufficiently deregulated,” stated the PCP leader, further emphasizing that it involves “new attacks on labor laws, including the attack on the right to strike.”
The government claims in this new legislative program that it “wants to reform the State” and, “has filled newspaper headlines and news broadcasts with this idea of reforming the State,” Paulo Raimundo said sarcastically.
“But what will the State be reformed for? So that the State responds better to each one? So that there is a better response from the National Health Service? So that the housing crisis is addressed? So that better public schools can be created in our country?” he questioned.
The PCP secretary-general’s response is “no,” because “the State reform that the government wants is a reform to adapt the State even more to the interests of those who exploit those who live and work here” and “not of those who live and work here.”
In his speech, following the CDU’s lead candidate for the Montemor-o-Novo City Council, Carlos Pinto de Sá, former president of this municipality and current president of Évora, on his last term in the district capital, Paulo Raimundo assured that the PCP will oppose the dismantling of the National Health Service and the public school system and the government’s “option” to “open the way for hands on Social Security money,” which “is work money, it is not anyone else’s.”
Among other issues, the communist leader also opposed the “2% increase in spending for the arms race,” as this money “is for the madness of war,” not to enhance the Armed Forces, nor the veterans.
