Statement by Jerónimo de Sousa, General Secretary of the PCP

About the results of the elections for local authorities 2021

About the results of the elections for local authorities 2021

The CDU notes the results achieved in a particularly demanding context. A result that had to face, in its construction, a set of adverse factors, but which the mobilization and commitment of thousands of activists and candidates built up, affirming our work, honesty and competence as recognized reasons for support and trust.

A result which, despite its national expression, falls short of the goals that were defined.

The CDU, regardless of the losses registered, confirms itself as a great force in local government.

The CDU greets the thousands of activists, the large number of young people and women who, side by side with the candidates, built up the campaign of clarification and mobilization that contributed to build the electoral result and greets all those who gave their vote to the CDU.

In each parish and municipality the populations will count on those elected by the CDU to continue working and striving for better living conditions.

After the elections for local authorities, the need to respond to the country's problems is more pressing.

To [respond to] the most immediate and urgent problems that remain unanswered and, above all, to initiate a policy capable of responding to the more general problems that affect the workers and the people and jeopardize the country’s conditions of development. Problems that these almost two years of the epidemic have exposed in their full scale.

There are no reasons for postponing choices and responses to national problems. Not only is there an urgent need for solutions, as they are possible.

The display of resources which the government propagandizes about must be translated into investments that respond to the needs of the populations and the country.

Questions that are crucial to the lives of millions of workers, such as their wages and the right to collective bargaining, decent working hours and permanent contracts, or the repeal of the burdensome rules of the labour legislation, must be answered. It is necessary to increase pensions with a view to restoring purchasing power for all pensioners. Public services such as the National Health Service, Public Schools, public transport, housing, culture and Environmental Protection need another level of response. The creation of a public network of free kindergartens for all children is indispensable.

The country's future is inseparable from its ability to produce and detain in its hands strategic instruments of the economy.

In 2020 and 2021 the emergence of the epidemic imposed the need for immediate responses for which the intervention of the PCP and PEV were decisive. The PCP and the PEV intervened with determination and achieved solutions and progress.

Now, after the time of the emergency response to the health issue, it is necessary to look to the future, to provide answers that can and must be given, to open prospects for an alternative policy.

An alternative that must be built with the struggle of the workers and the people, not limited to narrow readings and contents of the State budget for 2022. The forces that make up the CDU will take the initiative to affirm the alternative that is necessary, and of which the State budget is a part, but which goes beyond it in issues that are decisive for the lives of workers and populations.

These are the choices that must be made.

One cannot, in the name of the class options of the PS, postpone solutions and aggravate the country's problems.

Portugal needs a different policy, an alternative policy that can solve accumulated problems and embark on a trajectory of economic, social and environmental development.

For this path, the workers and the people can count on the PCP, the PEV, and the CDU, this decisive force that at their side does not dispense with striving for all the solutions that ensure raising their living standards and for a Portugal with a future.

  • Poder Local e Regiões Autónomas
  • Central