PSD president Luís Montenegro said on Saturday that Portugal is losing more quality of life and well-being than between 2011 and 2015, accusing the government of not taking advantage of the “opportunities” it had.
“With incredible conditioning, we succeeded [entre 2011 e 2015]not to lose as much quality of life and well-being in spite of all this as the one that has been lost in recent years,” said Luís Montenegro, speaking at the celebration of the 49th anniversary of the party, which took place at the Monastery of São Francisco, in Coimbra.
For the Social Democratic leader, the country loses “what is most basic”, namely daily well-being and quality of life, since during the “troika” period, when the PSD left the coalition with the CDS-PP, it was possible to to “sustain” loss, at a time of “truly intense and dramatic social difficulties”.
Luís Montenegro stressed that between 2011 and 2015, despite the crisis the country was going through, it was possible to ensure “access to health services, education, access to what is fundamental in life – food, energy, mobility”.
In 2012 and 2013, the unemployment rate reached more than 15% (currently about 6%), the minimum wage was below €500 and the global well-being index defined by the National Institute of Statistics (which aggregates the indexes of material living conditions and quality of life) was 33.9 in 2011 and 39 in 2015, while in 2021 (most available data) this was 45.7.
In a speech lasting more than half an hour, the Social Democratic leader opined that society today is “suffocated in taxes” and contributions to the state, and “receives in return the failure of all essential government policies, from health to education, from justice guard”.
“We are much impoverished in the statistics,” he criticized.
Faced with hundreds of PSD militants, Luís Montenegro believed that he is not surprised if the president of the republic speaks of the government as a “warmed up and tired” majority, because “only someone who is tired and warmed up cannot use making the opportunities in front of him to transform the opportunities in development and quality of life”.
Reacting to the resignation of Minister João Galamba, which was rejected by the Prime Minister, Luís Montenegro viewed the behavior of the PS government as “dramatic”, stressing that there would be no “feasible and understandable reason why the Prime Minister did not accept the request for resignation”.
“I don’t want to believe that the request was simulated and so was the response,” he said, laughing in the audience.
Faced with this situation, Montenegro says it is up to the “PSD not to abandon Portugal, nor to give up on Portugal, that to fail and give up, it is enough for Doctor António Costa and the Socialist Party”.
“If they say we are not prepared, it is because they do not want to admit that we are better prepared than this government and these rulers,” he stressed, listing a number of proposals that the PSD has presented in the face of the inflationary situation that affects the country.
Towards the end of his speech, Luís Montenegro stated that the Portuguese can count on the “democratic tolerance” of the party he leads.
“We don’t need to offend or obscure anyone to get our point across,” he said.
Source: DN
