Comrades and friends

A warm greeting to you all.

We came to our XX Congress after months of intervention, collective discussion and individual contribution, with thousands of meetings and Assemblies, tens of thousands of participants, a different and democratically superior process. We have imperfections and shortcomings, of course, but what strength is needed to intervene like this. Only a great and powerful collective like ours can do this, to ensure this great success, this great affirmation of the communist ideal and project, of this Portuguese Communist Party, which, for more than 95 years, generation after generation, constitutes, builds and projects for the future.

More than 95 years of struggle, with our liberating project on the horizon, always with the workers and the people, and in our Country, everything that was best done in terms of progress of the living conditions and rights, social progress and revolutionary transformation, has the contribution of the PCP. In recent years, we added new pages to this history, which we build day by day. We have never failed the commitment that comes from our identity. So it was, so it is, so it shall be.

The PCP is the party of the working class and of all workers, a characteristic that determines its class nature, it is the party that upholds the interests of the anti-monopolist classes and strata. The PCP is a politically and ideologically independent party. A characteristic that derives from its class nature and determines on all levels its independence from the influence, interests, ideology and policies of the forces of capital. Attentive to life, attentive to all the concerns, reflections and contributions, responding to the concrete situation, the Party follows its path, defines its strategy and tactics guided by Marxism-Leninism, rejecting all the drifts, all mystifying campaigns, all slanders, coming from the class enemies, who desperately seek to weaken and destroy it, and from those who converge with them.

Our party by its nature and objectives is a permanent target of capital and its means and structures.

Discrimination and silencing are associated with a strong ideological offensive, refined and adjusted to each situation.

They are attacks aimed at hampering the growth of the influence of the Party among the workers and the people with new doses of most primitive anticommunism.

They are attacks directed within the Party, against all and each one of us, targeting the features that are the basis of our strength. Knowing the importance of our functioning principles, they try to denigrate them and bring them into question, knowing that the strength of the Party lies on the conviction and action of its militants, they do not miss the opportunity to promote restlessness, demoralization and demobilization.

Some of the times they insist on the old theses of a party closed and turned to the past, at other times they scavenge the bin of relics and invent deviations to allegedly attack them.

Everything serves them in the lust to weaken us. They are wrong and have the answer of our collective, in our capacity to resist, in our independence of analysis and decision, independence from the forces of capital, of waves and interference, whatever they may be, whether they come through the mass media or electronic networks. Firm in our ideal and project, determined in action, we will fulfil our objectives.

We are also alert to a line of conditioning and limitation of the freedom of political organisation aimed primarily at our Party. An operation that comes from afar with the Laws on the Parties and on Party Financing and on election campaigns adopted on 24th. April 2003, which seeks to limit our decision on the functioning methods and which in particular, under the pretext of transparency and rigor, promotes interference and financial strangling. In an escalade which involves the Office of Accounting and Political Financing, with obscure centres of misinformation, with increasing defamation and arbitrariness, in a persecutory attitude that is now extended and developed with particular intensity, under the pretext of assets and taxes. These are not isolated episodes, it is an undemocratic process to which we must be alert and that needs to be denounced and fought.

The Party must have its own financial resources, its branch offices and support facilities, the space of the Avante Festival, different types of equipment, its means of propaganda and press. We do not accept dependence from economic and financial groups, or from the State, we are not the political branch of monopoly groups, we are not a department of the State. Ours is not an intervention supported on the promotion and favours of great mass media.

Our own resources are indispensable. And, when some seek to persecute us, when it comes to scavenging the resources that our Party owns and one feels that if they could they would snatch these resources from us, it is important to clarify a central aspect.

Faced with these antidemocratic purposes, even knowing that they cannot achieve them, we want to tell them that we know what they want and that they will never be able to affect us in substance. We continue and we will continue our action. And this is because the resources to support our activity are important, the branch offices are necessary. But our Party is its militants, the great collective that we are, with conviction, determination and capacity of each one of us, with the connection and influence in the workers and in the people where our roots are and who constitute an inexhaustible source of renewal and vitality. They can attack us, they can create difficulties, but we can with conviction affirm, nothing or nobody can prevent us from fighting for our goals, of fulfilling our liberating mission.

Comrades

It is very important, it is essential that we nurture the Party, for today and tomorrow.

As the draft Political Resolution points out, measures are required. Urgent and profound measures of affirmation and strengthening of the Party. The next few years will be difficult. Looking to the world, to Europe and to our own Country, let no one expect facilities. But here we are and we will be with great confidence. We will act in every battle with whatever strength we have, seeking to expand our capacity and influence. Fighting, resisting, advancing.

We affirm our identity, the communist identity. We have as our goal the revolutionary overcoming of capitalism.

We fight the aims of those who want to disfigure us and use as a decorative figure, we fight the aims of those who preach distrust, disbelief and demobilization.

We trust our strength. We will take advantage of all the possibilities of the correlation of forces in this new phase of national political life to defend, restore and conquer rights, but this immediate objective, being very complex and demanding, is the simplest.

The most difficult, the most necessary, the essential is to move towards a rupture with the domination of monopoly capital and external dependence, for the affirmation of the patriotic and left-wing alternative, of advanced democracy, of the values of April, is to tread the path of a New Society, free from the exploitation of man by man, socialism and communism.

But that is what we are here for, that is why we exist, that is what we will do.

Long live the XX Congress!
Long live the Portuguese Communist Party!