The Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) responded to the president of the European Parliament considering that “in Ukraine what exists is a simulacrum of a Parliament, from whose composition democratic, left-wing and progressive forces were banned and outlawed.
The PCP’s response, posted on the party’s webpage, comes after Roberta Metsola’s passage through Lisbon and her intervention in the Assembly of the Republic, in which she challenged communist deputy Paula Santos to speak in the Kiev Parliament before Ukrainian deputies.
“The PCP rejects and repudiates the expressions of arrogance and interference that the president of the European Parliament decided to exercise in her passage through the Assembly of the Republic,” reads the note, which adds that “Metsola should know that in truth in Ukraine what exists is a simulacrum of Parliament, from whose composition democratic, leftist, and progressive forces were banned and outlawed.”
For the PCP, “what [Metsola] proclaims, ‘to speak freely’ in that forum, is an impossibility,” add the communists, for whom in the Ukrainian Parliament “there are essentially reactionary and fascist forces, constituted from a power based on Nazi-like forces that not only prevents the exercise of the right to opinion, but promotes the imprisonment and assassination of those who affirm a different opinion, facts that do not seem to bother Metsola.
On Friday, Roberta Metsola, in a part of her speech addressed to the Communist parliamentary leader, Paula Santos, said, “I have decided to speak in the Parliament of Ukraine on April 1, 2022; I ask you to say what you said here in front of Ukrainian MPs. To speak to those MPs who do not speak to their wives for weeks, whose children cannot go to school (…). This is not about sitting at the table and getting people to negotiate, this is about getting Russia out of Ukraine. No more and no less,” Metsola said.
The communist parliamentary leader reiterated that “it is necessary to stop instigating and feeding the war in Ukraine and to open ways of negotiation”, and considered that “the EU that mobilizes and makes available millions of euros for armament is the same one that refuses to valorize salaries and pensions”.
On the effects of the war in Ukraine, particularly economic ones, Metsola added that it is necessary to listen to young people affected by the housing crisis and business people hit by inflation.
Roberta Metsola participated on Friday in a debate in the Portuguese Parliament that she considered “very animated” by the deputies of the various Portuguese parties.
It was the first time that a president of a European institution participated in a debate with parliamentary leaders in the plenary of the Assembly of the Republic.
During the afternoon, Roberta Metsola participated in the Council of State, at the invitation of the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
The meeting addressed the perspectives on the current European agenda, less than a year before the European Parliament elections.
