Just as the nationalisations were a central feature of the revolutionary process, from their implementation through the actions of the People-Armed Forces Alliance to their enshrinement in the Constitution of the Republic on April 2, 1976, the privatisations were also one of the central elements of the counter-revolutionary process, first in the reconstruction of monopoly capitalism and the power of the big families, later on in the denationalisation of the economy and many of its strategic sectors, with the consequences that are there to see: the destruction of the productive apparatus and the impoverishment of the productive profile; the loss of revenue by the State, the drop in national income, the balance of payments deficit with the growing outflow of national resources abroad and the increase in foreign debt; the progressive degradation of public services; the degradation of workers' living conditions with the growing precariousness of labour relations; the growing domination of economic power over political power, degrading democracy; and less and less economic sovereignty.
The fact that the revolutionary process, in less than two years, produced the advances that 48 years of counter-revolution have still not managed to completely reverse, is proof of the profoundly popular and democratic character of the Portuguese Revolution.
After 1976, the Portuguese political process was marked by two antagonistic dynamics: on the one hand, the energies released by the Revolution and the nationalisations, pushing the country forward, and on the other hand, the counter-revolutionary action, seeking to reverse the achievements of the revolution.
The privatisation process goes ahead by the hand of those who promised the Portuguese people the so-called democratic socialism while embracing right-wing policies.
This was the case with the media, a strategic sector for the political struggle, but also with banking, a key sector for leveraging the other privatisations in a disguised, phased process.
Many companies were only partially privatised, with the State retaining the majority of the capital or a minority but decisive position, like a “golden share”, and later on selling off all the capital.
Handing over companies to national groups who then took it upon themselves to denationalise them and hand them over to foreign capital, and only later, the state itself denationalising them directly.
Aiming for the privatisation of non-strategic economic sectors, then moving on to strategic sectors but keeping public services in the State, and finally, as we are seeing now, even moving towards the progressive privatisation of public services and even State functions such as healthcare, education and justice.
The privatisation process underwent and is undergoing different tactics:
- the under-financing and sabotage of public companies, a process that continues;
- the invention of increasingly complex, inefficient and less transparent regulatory frameworks for the State business sector;
- the inclusion of certain privatisations in external interference packages such as the many liberalising processes of the European Union or the packages imposed by the troika;
- the deterioration of working conditions and pay in the Public Sector, eroding companies from within, limiting their ability to respond, and seeking to distance workers from the defence of their public and national character;
- the recurrent promises to workers and the population of the wonders of privatisation, of prices that will always go down and services that will always improve;
- the systematic black campaigns on nationalised sectors, while at the same time promoting the ideological values of neoliberalism, creating real myths.
But reality, whenever it manages to dispel the smokescreen set up by the dominant ideology, disproves all myths.
Every privatisation of the past is a school for today's generations.
Let's look at the banking sector, whose public character put Portugal at the forefront of banking services on a global scale, and today, after receiving more than 20 billion euros in public support, it is controlled, with the exception of CGD, by foreign capital, and sucks up the national economy instead of the role it should play in stimulating investment and growth.
Let's look at energy, where privatisations have been carried out in the wake of liberalisation processes, and with what result?
Huge profits that these companies accumulate and transfer out of the country and the increasingly high price that we pay for access to energy.
Let's look at telecommunications.
Where the privatisation of PT and liberalisation have placed the sector in the hands of multinationals, with the Portuguese people paying outrageous prices for access to a fundamental service that should be public, and which could and should be provided on a universal basis and on the way to being free of charge.
Or postal services, where the privatisation of CTT has led to the degradation of the public postal service, the alienation of the company's vast assets and the abandonment of the population.
Let's look at Sorefame, whose privatisation promised to put Portugal in a position to produce trains for the whole world, but which ended up shutting down national production and contributing to the country not buying a single train for over 20 years.
Let's look at Healthcare, where the private sector has grown by devouring NHS resources.
When we look at the crisis facing the NHS today, it is important to remember that it was precisely to prevent this crisis that the PCP demanded the changes to the 2022 State Budget that the PS refused and ended up dictating its non-approval.
Let's look at ANA, whose privatisation is going to cost the country 20 billion euros according to the calculations drawn up by the Court of Auditors itself, which has been attacked so profusely for daring to say this.
At ANA, which as a public company supported all the modernisation of the national airport network and now transfers hundreds of millions of euros a year to Vinci's shareholders and delays all investment in Portugal.
Let's look at TAP, which has been rescued three times from privatisation processes that would destroy it and has already been thrown into another similar process.
A privatisation that has already been announced by the present government and which, if it went ahead, would wipe out the country's largest service exporter and worsen the country's external dependence.
And in all these processes, we see the lies, the lack of transparency and the massive corruption that are hallmarks of the privatisation process.
Some will say that we only see the dark side of privatisation, and that is so because we're looking at it from the point of view of the interests of the Portuguese workers and people.
Of course, there is a bright side to privatisations.
They were great for the big families and the multinationals.
Under the shade of privatisations, a number of brokers have become wealthy because of the role they played in the process or the position they have achieved in the liberalised model, as consultants or regulators or managers of private capital accumulation.
Under the shade of the privatisations, many of the key players of the PSD, CDS, PS, but also Chega and IL, found shelter on the boards of directors and in the top positions of many of these companies.
This process has been going on for 48 years.
But it's not finished. And that is a task that the current PSD and CDS government has set itself.
For now, it has only announced the fifth attempt to privatise TAP and the development of a restructuring plan for the State Business Sector, which it has included in the proposed State Budget for 2025.
But let there be no illusions about what this restructuring will be.
The plan is vast, and its aim is not to solve any national problem, but to transfer as much social property as possible to big business, to those who live off the revenue generated by the application of previously accumulated capital.
It's a plan whose implementation will involve the most diverse tactics and speeds.
Withdrawing advertising from RTP is a way of privatising the sector, right away by privatising the revenue that can sustain the sector.
The privatisation of CP is also on the cards when the government's programme talks about liberalising long-distance services or when admitting the possibility of breaking CP up into sections and dispersing them over the regions.
The water sector is also a target, despite the resounding failure of the privatisations that have taken place to date.
The extension of port concessions to 75 years, included in the proposed State Budget, is another way of privatising.
What's more, having approved the State Budget with the PS, the government is going to show what its aims are.
After the period of the troika and the pact of aggression that impoverished and devastated the country, privatisations are here again, supported by the government's action and the support it is given for this purpose, which ranges from the PS to Chega.
The PCP will relentlessly fight the economic crime they represent.
One of the first initiatives we presented in this parliamentary term was precisely to set up a Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry into the privatisation of ANA.
We will bring proposals to a vote in this State Budget to stop the privatisation and to develop TAP.
To defend CP and ensure its operation throughout the country.
To restore the revenue that the government wants to take away from RTP and ensure the public service of television and radio.
To rescue road concessions handed over to public-private partnerships that are a robbery of the Portuguese people.
To defend and valorise the NHS and reduce the transfer of its resources to private groups in the healthcare business.
A fight that will last beyond the discussion of the State Budget and which, as at other times, will require the mobilisation of the workers of these companies and sectors, and of all the Portuguese people, to prevent Portugal from continuing to be sold off in pieces.
Continuing to resist this privatisation process is in the interests and demands of the workers, the people and the country, its development and its sovereignty.
One of these days, the most reactionary right - with the connivance of those who have always walked arm in arm with it - will want to commemorate the military coup of the 25th. of November.
They will not be the people's commemorations, because those, and only those, are of April.
And it is with the people that the PCP stands, the people who this year in April filled Avenida da Liberdade and so many squares and avenues all over this country to commemorate the 50th. anniversary of the Portuguese Revolution.
These were the people who, together with the Armed Forces Movement, had the strength to socialise, to nationalise the bulk of the strategic sectors of the Portuguese economy, to open up horizons of hope for themselves that the ruling classes had for centuries sworn were impossible.
Without belittling the need to combat the rewriting and falsification of history, the essential thing on this occasion is not to prove what the 25th. of November was, as opposed to what they say it was (a counter-revolutionary coup, not a countercoup); what the 25th. of November was not, but what some (not all, let's be fair) wanted it to have been - a coup to halt the revolutionary dynamics and the process of transformations and achievements that the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic came to enshrine, to repress and outlaw the PCP, to liquidate the democratic regime - what is important now is to unveil and expose the operation behind the so-called 25th. of November commemorations that the most reactionary right-wing has long encouraged and decided to try to impose.
An operation that is a provocation in the year that marks the fiftieth anniversary of the April Revolution.
An operation driven by a repressed and anti-democratic nonconformism with the 25th. April Revolution, which seeks to belittle and confront its values and achievements.
An operation that is explained by the growing presence and promotion of reactionary conceptions in Portuguese society, by the increasingly clear affirmation of forces and parties driven by a retrograde, anti-democratic and fascistic ideology, and by the intention of its promoters to take further their destructive rage against the reality of April, which is still present in the country.
What lies behind the initiative of those who support the PSD/CDS government, with the support of their surrogates IL and Chega and the complicity and acquiescence of other political forces, is to relaunch the counter-revolutionary offensive against April and legitimise their own destructive choices and policies.
What they want to do is hide the fact that the country's current serious problems and difficulties are the result of their political choices of years and years against April, its achievements and values.
The forces of revenge want to rewrite history and present the 25th. of November not for what it was, but for what they wish it had been - a return to the past of half a century of fascist dictatorship.
What they want to do is try to equate a counter-revolutionary coup, despite being based on the darkest intentions of some, with the liberating Revolution of the 25th. of April.
The Revolution that restored democracy, freedom and peace to the Portuguese people and paved the way for a future of progress, development and social emancipation that decades of right-wing policies have sought to curtail.
They try to celebrate, with undisguised nostalgia, a not completed reactionary setback, and the promoters of this initiative want to reintroduce the divisive factors in Portuguese society that marked the 25th. of November, to the detriment of what unites the Portuguese people about what April represents, its achievements and values, including as a project and perspective for the future of Portugal.
The PCP rejects the ongoing operation and its anti-democratic aims of devaluing and erasing 25th. April and promoting reactionary conceptions and projects.
This vast operation includes the session planned in the Assembly of the Republic to commemorate the 25th. of November, at which the Communist MPs, marking their unequivocal opposition and protest, will not be present.
It is April and its values that democrats and patriots, workers and the people in general must affirm and demand be fulfilled in its dimension of transformation, equality and justice.
It is April with its huge heritage of achievements and rights - political, social, economic and cultural - that lives on and is present as a reference for the future, as the gigantic commemoration of the 50th. anniversary of the April Revolution has shown.
It is April that should be commemorated as the most remarkable moment in our history and not the conspiracies, coups and practices that have been devised against it, which deny it and seek to devalue it.
We will continue this fight to affirm the values of April.
Fighting the policy that denies rights, increases exploitation, undermines sovereignty and denies a future of development and social progress.
Fighting privatisations and the domination of monopoly groups over the economy and national life.
It is to this fight for a break with right-wing policies and for the implementation of a patriotic and left-wing policy that the PCP is giving substance, with its action and initiative, by boosting the struggle, by presenting proposals and solutions as it is currently doing in the debate on the State Budget, by encouraging convergence and joint action by all the other democrats and patriots who are not giving up or renouncing a Portugal with a future.
