At the opening of the concert “Camões, cultural expression of a changing world” at the Conservatory of Music auditorium, part of the PCP program to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the birth of the author of Lusíadas, Paulo Raimundo drew a parallel between the poet’s causes and those of the PCP.
“Celebrating Camões and his work is always remembering that today’s struggles for wages, pensions, and rights, against the labor package and for building the general strike, for the right to health, housing, public school, and culture, are part of the same historical process of denunciation and fight against injustices in which Camões, despite the difference in context and time, was extraordinarily involved,” he stated.
The PCP’s general secretary also emphasized that marking the 500 years of Luís de Camões’s birth is “giving voice to the people whom he always exalted, who fought to defend national independence and who, with their hands, always sooner or later, oppose the conformism that some seek to impose.”
Facing an audience that did not fill the auditorium of the Coimbra Conservatory, the communist leader took the opportunity to evoke the 1974 April 25 Revolution as a “major moment” of the Portuguese people and a date “that some seek to erase from the collective memory to, above all, end its achievements and values.”
“This major and unique date that some want to rewrite and replace with any other, to consolidate a direction and an open policy that tightens the life of the majority and concentrates wealth, benefits, and privileges in the hands of a few, who think they own everything,” he stressed.
According to Paulo Raimundo, this direction has “decades” and is now being pursued by the “current PSD and CDS government,” with a policy supported by Chega, Iniciativa Liberal, and the complicity of PS, putting Portugal “in the hands of the big economic groups of the multinationals.”
Raimundo stated that the government’s course presents itself with “policies contrary to the needs of the majority of those who live and work in Portugal, disinvestment and attack on the National Health Service, public school and culture, low wages and pensions, and brutal difficulties in access to housing and worsening precariousness.”
“As Camões noted, a weak king makes a weak people. And this direction and this submissive policy before the powerful weaken the people and their lives,” he emphasized.
