Santos Silva participated in a panel at the PS parliamentary sessions held in Penafiel, where he accused Luís Montenegro’s Government of having “a specialist in degrading public services” and focusing only on “segments of public employees that electorally escaped them,” using the budget surplus to win them over.
“The biggest grievance the PS Parliamentary Group will cause the current Government, a grievance they deserve, is to abstain on the budget, preventing them from continuing to be a mere electoral committee, scraping the bottom of the barrel left well-stocked by Finance Minister Fernando Medina and his predecessors,” he stated.
According to the former Speaker of the Assembly of the Republic, this approach “might temporarily satisfy more demanding voices,” but does not employ a “policy of qualifying public employees” to “increase the efficiency of public services and the quality of services provided to the populations.”
“Indeed, the socialists are the first to understand that the ultimate aim of their activity is the general population, all citizens, and everything else is instrumental,” he emphasized.
Near the end of his speech, Santos Silva quoted Mao Tse-Tung and endorsed the notion that “relying on one’s own strength and being attacked by the enemy is not a bad thing, it’s a good thing.”
“And by the way, attack the enemy. The enemy in this case is stagnation and the attempt to turn the country’s governance into an exercise of sheer electoralism,” he stressed.
For the socialist, “relying on one’s own strength means using resources, municipalities, and that great popular and national party that is the PS.”
