During the solemn session commemorating the 50th Anniversary of November 25, 1975, held in parliament, PS deputy Marcos Perestrello delivered a speech with harsh criticisms of Luís Montenegro’s Government for its “poor idea of commemorating November 25 in the way it does.”
“The illegitimate manner in which the Government, supported by its majority, seeks to appropriate November 25, instrumentalizing it, represents another act of subordination to the nostalgic far-right, which, in truth, seeks a pretext to deny April 25, its prominence, its fundamental and incomparable place, which closed the cycle of 48 years of dictatorship,” criticized the socialist, receiving a standing ovation from the PS bench.
The PS deputy described the Government’s plan as an attempt at a deceptive and manipulative appropriation of a historical event, typical of non-democratic regimes that try to control and impose their version of the past, which ultimately works against November 25 by distorting its meaning.
“Therefore, November 25 was not an isolated event. As I just mentioned, it was the culmination of a civil resistance movement against the totalitarian distortion of April 25,” he emphasized.
Marcos Perestrello stated that November 25 represented a victory for democracy and freedom over the vanguard revolutionary projects that had brought the country to the brink of civil war, and a victory for the PS and democrats.
“It was not, as it is now being made to seem, a victory of the right over the left. Far from it,” he asserted amidst remarks from the right benches suggesting “nobody said that.”
The PS deputy argued that “the undemocratic left was defeated,” but “the undemocratic right also suffered a heavy defeat” as the illegalization of the PCP was prevented and fascist organizations were banned in the Constitution.
Praising the actions of Mário Soares, Perestrello quoted from the book “Portugal: What Revolution?”: “at once, November 25 stifled the suicidal tendencies of the far-left and cut the wings of the far-right.”
Among other left-wing speeches – with the PCP again absent – Livre deputy and presidential candidate Jorge Pinto highlighted that while November 25 was relevant to democratic construction, no date ever comes close to the foundational date of April 25, asserting that Livre will not support any historical rewrite.
Quoting Rodrigo Sousa e Castro, one of the military authors of the so-called “Documento dos Nove,” Jorge Pinto further stated that “those who now want to commemorate November 25 are those who lost because none of their objectives were achieved,” believing Portugal “should be proud” of its achievements over the past 50 years.
BE’s sole coordinator and deputy, Mariana Mortágua, expressed that she viewed the solemn session not as a “homage to democracy,” but as “an attempt to rewrite its history by the right-wing parties that, unable to overcome April 25 nor erase it, try to amputate its meaning,” accusing these parties of “cowardly waiting half a century to attempt to revise Portugal’s history.”
Inês de Sousa Real, spokesperson for PAN, noted this date, “often used as a weapon,” as the moment when the country decided that “pluralist democracy would not be a mere parenthesis, but the rule,” but lamented that today it is impossible to look at the chamber without “seeing, once again, trenches” and a space where “cordiality among peers gave way to institutionalized bad manners.”
