The BE coordinator stated that the party wants to “defeat the right” in the elections and “be decisive for the solutions that count”, criticizing the candidates for the PS leadership for not “making a critical reflection” on the absolute majority .
At a press conference in Lisbon, after a meeting of the BE National Council, Mariana Mortágua said the party had set “two objectives” for the March 10 parliamentary elections.
“The first goal is to defeat the right. If the PS leaves the country in a quagmire, the right will only dig deeper and widen this quagmire, with more policies against public services, with more policies of promiscuity between public and private, with the delivery of what remains and is ours to the private sector,” he said.
According to Mariana Mortágua, the right has “no solution whatsoever” to the current “social and political” crisis – the responsibility of which it attributes to the absolute majority of the PS – because it proposes “the same regime of business, privileges and revolving door”. “.
In addition to this first objective, the BE coordinator said that the party also wants to “be decisive for the solutions that count” and “have a say in the post-elections, which will determine the policies that will move forward in Portugal”, in the particularly in the areas of health care, housing, education and wages.
“The path after the election is a path that either tells someone who can’t find a house now that he will be able to find one, (…) or that tells people that they will at least receive their paychecks. have a horizon for the future, otherwise there is no path at all,” he said.
When asked when the bloc plans to present its election manifesto – according to the draft resolution approved by this National Council, the first candidates for the elections will be decided at a meeting in December – Mariana Mortágua indicated that the party is preparing, but that its “main proposals are already known”.
“We have been fighting for them for years and it is this path of cohesion that we have followed in recent years. It is not new to anyone that we have the precise expression of what must happen in the law in order to preserve our rights. doctors in the SNS. (…) Whoever says this in the field of health care says this in the field of housing, education, salaries or industrial conversion,” he said.
When asked whether the fact that she wants to be decisive in the post-elections is an expression of the availability for a new “apparatus”, Mariana Mortágua replied that, when she currently looks at the two candidates for socialist leadership – Pedro Nuno Santos and José Luís Carneiro -, no sees “a critical reflection” or an “admission of the political and social crisis”, which he believes has been caused by the absolute majority.
“What I see is that these candidates are taking over the entire legacy of the PS, as if it were a simple succession, as if the country is not immersed in a social crisis that needs to be responded to,” he criticized.
Mariana Mortágua stated that Pedro Nuno Santos and José Luís Carneiro claim that “there is a good legacy of the absolute majority that must be continued”, which she considered “a guarantee of more crisis, more instability and, ultimately, it is also in this instability that is growing on the far right.”
Mariana Mortágua said she believed there were many “well-meaning” people who voted for the PS in the last parliamentary elections “waiting for stability and an alternative to the right,” but added that this vote “resulted in a PS administration that everyone disappointed. expectations of stability”.
“To tell people that the path to stability is the same PS with the absolute majority that brought a political and social crisis to the country is to mislead people and I think we cannot do that,” he defended.
When asked whether she finds the conversations between the Prime Minister and the President of the Republic worrying, the BE coordinator replied: “It is so worrying that it is my duty not to add confusion to the confusion.”
Source: DN
