“Not for its severity, one might say it took a blackout to shed light on what we have been saying for years,” Paulo Raimundo remarked during a speech at a CDU (PCP and “Os Verdes” Ecologist Party) dinner at the Clube Desportivo Moitense in Marinha Grande.
The communist leader referred to the widespread power outage that hit the Iberian Peninsula on Monday for several hours, which Paulo Raimundo believes exposed the vulnerabilities of the country’s energy security and sovereignty.
“They have been submitted to the market logic and the maximum profit of large private economic groups that dominate the energy sector today,” he stated.
While acknowledging that the public sector could not have prevented the blackout, the PCP secretary-general argued that the nation’s electrical security and sovereignty are “too critical to be in the hands of private interests.”
He applies the same logic to advocate for the nationalization of energy production, marketing, and distribution while also addressing the issues experienced in communications that day when the SIRESP network failed.
“Communications cannot fail. The State cannot be in the hands of private operators, it must have its operator, its communication redundancy to prevent this from happening again,” he insisted.
Moreover, Paulo Raimundo expressed concern over the creation of a “technical and multisectoral working team” for the “urgent replacement” of the SIRESP network following the blackout.
