The current epidemic outbreak has to be tackled, prevented and fought with determination, mobilizing the means and resources essential to defend health and life. But it cannot be used and instrumentalized, taking advantage of legitimate concerns, to serve as a pretext for the worsening of exploitation and for an attack on workers' rights.

1. The needs to respond to the epidemic outbreak of COVID-19, namely with regard to the urgent strengthening of the capacity of the National Health Service and measures to defend economic activities, employment and income of workers, their labour rights, demand with more pressing urgency that the country face and resolutely reject the constraints resulting from submission to the impositions of the European Union, which are not only at the root of the problems that the people and the country face, but hinder their resolution.

1- The country’s situation, in view of the developments of the COVID-19 epidemic outbreak, requires continued compliance with the guidelines recommended by Health authorities and which have deserved the widespread and exemplary understanding and acceptance by the Portuguese people, as well as measures to strengthen the response capacity of the National Health Service.

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Prime Minister, Ladies and Gentlemen Members of Parliament, Under the Constitution and the law on the state of siege and emergency, the declaration of a state of emergency should not be decided on the basis of abstract or theoretical considerations, it requires the substantiated findings of the existence of an exceptional framework that can justify such a decision and the specifically identified measures that can only be implemented following that declaration.