The promises to increase the solidarity allowance for the elderly to 820 euros by 2028 and the complete replacement of teachers’ service time, made by Luís Montenegro, were received by the main candidates for the post of Secretary General of the PS and by the leaders of the Bloco de Esquerda and the PCP with attacks on the contradiction between what was said at the end of the 41st PSD Congress and the measures taken by the government of Pedro Passos Coelho between 2011 and 2015, when Luís Montenegro headed the social democratic party. parliamentary group. But also with the positions of your party in this parliamentary term.
Reacting to Montenegro’s guarantee that he will not cut “a cent of any pension” if he becomes prime minister, socialist Pedro Nuno Santos accused the PSD president of “repeating the same number as Passos Coelho in 2011”. In his address to pensioners, the former Infrastructure Minister said the PSD was “the party that abused this group of Portuguese citizens the most”.
His main rival in the PS internal elections, José Luís Carneiro, criticized the PSD for “now promising everything and everyone”, despite having wanted to cut pensions by 600 million euros during his government. The current Minister of the Interior, who was in Porto to present a series of social support proposals, said that the Portuguese still remember that Montenegro, when he was parliamentary leader of the PSD, “defended a policy where we totally were against, because of cuts in pensions, cuts in salaries and the call for young people and teachers to leave the country.”
During a lunch meeting in Marinha Grande, Bloco de Esquerda coordinator Mariana Mortágua said that “the PSD has a history that the people do not forget and that the people do not forgive,” like the last time it governed Portugal. “It chose to raise taxes and freeze pensions, even though it promised to do the exact opposite.”
On the other hand, referring to the guarantees left by the PSD president that he will be able to solve the housing problem if he becomes Prime Minister, Mariana Mortágua – who called the Social Democratic leader “Cinderella” in his first speech to members of Congress last Saturday – criticized the impact of the Cristas Law, saying that the PSD-CDS government has “imposed a law to increase incomes”, promoting local accommodation and tourist resorts, “without measure and without limitation”, in addition to “the inventing the Golden Visa.”
For his part, the general secretary of the PCP, Paulo Raimundo, emphasized that just a few days ago the PSD accepted proposals from the communist parliamentary group with a view to increasing pensions and reforms, which were included during the vote on the 2024 state budget had been submitted, had been rejected.
According to the communist leader, Luís Montenegro tried to “reset the odometer”, but “it is remarkable to hear that the PSD promises increases in pensions and reforms”, adding that “it is not worth going back eight years to remind them of the cuts in reforms and pensions’, and ‘we go back eight years to confront them with the biggest tax increase of all time, namely that of the PSD-CDS government’.
Source: DN
