The April Revolution is the heritage of the people and the heritage of the future!

Today we celebrate April with the confidence that the best of its historic path is yet to come and that, sooner or later, the struggle of the workers and the people, the struggle of the democrats, will bring it to its fullest!

The Assembly of the Republic decided and well, to commemorate the April Revolution.

At no time in our collective life, even when facing the greatest difficulties and feeling the greatest concerns, we should stop living and celebrating April. And if there is a time when the 25th. April cannot be erased, this is it, to confirm and reaffirm the importance of its liberating project and the topicality of its values and its ideals of freedom, social and national emancipation.

Yes, it was necessary to be here, to laud the determination of our people who love freedom and regained it and who today, like us here, at 3 pm and all over the country, will sing Grândola and the National Anthem to answer to the valorous and highly courageous action of the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) and to the unity built of strong wills that brought People and MFA together to carry out the most modern and advanced act and process of our contemporary era.

A new time, in rupture with a fascist, oppressive and obscurantist past that today some wearing new and disguised robes aim to whitewash, denigrating Abril. A new time that enabled to transform the reality lived and with it transformed and in transformation change the way of seeing the world and society itself.

Yes, it was a Revolution that wanted to go a long way in breaking the many shackles of secular oppression and exploitation. A Revolution that chose and decided to create this precious asset that we now value so much and that the epidemic outbreak has shown to be irreplaceable - our National Health Service - that we need to value and reinforce. That chose the consecration of universal social rights to education, social security, culture and the valorisation of work and workers and their rights. That chose to end the domination of the economy by the monopolies and big land owners. That opted for peace against the interests of those who waged wars.

The Revolution was faced from an early age with the resistance from powerful economic and political interests and many of its achievements suffered setbacks. Much remained to be done.

There is much to be done and more than ever it is necessary, in these unsettling times, to follow the path that Abril opened, renewing the commitment to its important values.

It is the April values that can light the way for Portugal. The values of freedom, democracy, the nature of the State designed to respond to the interests and needs of the people and the country, as opposed to the conception of the State as an instrument to serve capital and exploitation.

It is the values of economic development that should aim to improve the living conditions of the Portuguese, full employment, a fair and balanced distribution of national wealth, sovereignty and national independence.

It is the April values that strengthen us as a people and can help us to overcome the problems that years of policies have denied and that the current epidemic situation has worsened.

Values that can and should be embodied into a concrete, patriotic and left-wing political programme, giving expression to the set of the dimensions of the April democracy that we want and propose and must be simultaneously political, economic, social and cultural.

We experience difficult times. Those who just a while ago said that we lived beyond our means are back exacerbating real difficulties. They are back ranting their old prescriptions, magnifying catastrophic scenarios, to justify further exploitation.

Here they are rehearsing the discourse of the inevitability of cutting wages, pensions and rights and thinking on keeping their instruments of exploitation untouched.

We cannot accept it!

It is not inevitable that the epidemic will lead to a regression in the lives of workers and people. The answer to the difficulties is to valorise wages and with policies aimed to protect and create jobs.

Accustomed to having a reserved seat at the State Budget table - the big economic and financial groups - are already claiming millions from the public coffers.

We are told that we are all on the same boat. The same ones that are at the root of the glaring inequalities are now the champions of a national consensus.

No, the Portuguese are not under the same conditions, neither are those who continue with their coffers full and those who become poor while working and are in debt. Those who are in lay-off and unemployed. Those who have worked a lifetime and have meagre pensions, because they have always had low wages. As are small and medium-size entrepreneurs.

There are those who continue to stash millions in the Netherlands and offshores to evade tax authorities and those who go from precarious employment to precarious employment and without means of livelihood.

Rights cannot be quarantined!

Mr Speaker and Honourable Members of the Parliament,

The situation we are experiencing shows the importance of public services to serve the people and the country and shows the fallacy of the discourse of demonization of the State and of public investment or public expenditure. It shows the mistaken policies of subordinating national production that neoliberal fundamentalism justified and that the European Union preached and imposed.

This is the time to recognise that the path is to fulfil the Constitution of the Republic and not oppose it.
Yes, we need to produce here what we were forced to buy abroad, modernising and diversifying economic activities. We need to recover for the country what should never have been privatised.

We need to speed up investment. Acquire the equipment that the country needs, build infrastructure, ensure essential public services.

We need to materialize April and celebrate it thinking of the May Day of those who work and we salute. A special greeting to the hundreds of thousands who are there now-a-days and every day, in hospitals and essential public services, in factories and fields to ensure that the country does not stop.

Yes, may April always live, now more than ever!