Leader Paulo Raimundo has been unanimously elected secretary general of the PCP, the communist leadership announced on Saturday. The announcement was made by Margarida Botelho, from the Secretariat of the Communist Central Committee: “The Central Committee elected Paulo Raimundo as general secretary of the PCP. The proposal was approved unanimously. Comrade Paulo Raimundo decided not to vote.”
Paulo Raimundo, 46, is the PCP’s fourth general secretary in the democracy, succeeding Jerónimo de Sousa, who left the position after 18 years for health reasons.
The party’s new secretary general is one of five leaders who are simultaneously part of the Central Committee, the Political Committee and the Secretariat. Paulo Raimundo, a party operative since 2004, is described by the PCP as a worker.
Born in 1976, Paulo Raimundo joined the JCP in 1991 and the PCP in 1994, becoming an employee ten years later, beginning a meteoric rise in the governing bodies. Only two years after joining, he was elected to the CC in 1996.
In 2000 he rose to the position of the Political Committee, in 2016 he was elected member of the secretariat. In 2020 he will be elected to these two bodies, alongside names such as Jerónimo de Sousa, Francisco Lopes, Jorge Cordeiro and José Capucho.
Paulo Raimundo was born in Cascais, in the Lisbon district, to Beja’s parents who settled in Setúbal. According to the biographical data released by the PCP, he attended Faralhão Primary School, in the parish of Sado, Setúbal, and spent his childhood “between life on the streets” and accompanying his mother to work in the agriculture, cleaning and construction. ”.
He worked for some time as a baker and carpenter – the PCP does not specify how long – and became employed at the age of 19. He completed 5th and 6th grades at Telescola and attended Bela Vista Secondary School, where he was on the sorority lists in 10th grade. He finished 12th grade at night as a working student and had no higher education.
The democratic history of the PCP has been written to this day with three General Secretaries, from the historic Álvaro Cunhal, the Moscow apprentice who lived underground and revived a position that had been empty for 25 years, to the worker Jerónimo de Sousa, a follower of folk wisdom and that in 2015 he presented António Costa with an agreement on the left to “remove the right from power”.
Paulo Raimundo, a prominent figure within the party, despite being unknown in the media sphere, will now write the next chapter.
Source: DN
