First of all, on behalf of the Central Committee, please allow me to greet our whole Party, its organisations, all the militants who in companies, in workplaces, in cities, towns and villages, in class-oriented and associative movements, in the various institutions, in Local and Regional Government, in the Assembly of the Republic and in the European Parliament, who, in these difficult times of epidemic outbreak, wherever necessary, fulfil their role and our duty to uphold the interests of the workers and people.

They were there, acting and presenting solutions to ensure the best and most effective ways to defend public health, to curtail the economic and social consequences of the epidemic, tabling proposals and demanding solutions to address pressing social problems, denouncing, resisting and fighting those who, without scruples, always find an excuse to further exploitation and enrich themselves at the expense of the difficulties of the workers and people.

This Party, which as a whole, guaranteeing the necessary sanitary conditions, did not allow itself to be blackmailed or conditioned by pressures from those who want to make room for solutions of social and civilizational regression. That is why, at the same time that we demanded measures to defend the health of the populations, we fought against fear and alarmism, a weapon of the lords in command and of the great economic and financial interests that aspire to paralyse everything and everyone who oppose them and leave the field free for predatory and exploitative actions.

This Party which, knowing these aims and this danger, denounced and refused to resort to an unnecessary State of Emergency. Safeguarding public health could have been guaranteed by other means, without muzzling the exercise of workers' rights.

We salute this Party that did not let April be erased and did everything possible to celebrate with dignity the most important event in the contemporary history of the country. This Party which stood alongside CGTP-IN, supported and valued the national May Day struggle throughout the country and pointed out the path of the struggle, at a time when a process of imposing workers’ silence was underway, while they sought to destroy their jobs, their wages, their rights.

We were there and today we are here because we do not remain silent in the face of injustice. We were there and we are here today because we will not accept the destruction of labour and social rights of the workers and people without fighting. We were there and we are here today because we will not allow inequalities to grow. We are here today because it is necessary to continue on the front line, with confidence and struggle for a better life, for the construction of a Portugal with a future on the horizon!

We are here today because it is necessary to strengthen the struggle with the expansion of our action, to ensure sanitary and medical conditions to safeguard the health of the populations.

Yes, it is necessary to continue to act to safeguard the health and life of the Portuguese. To this effect, we presented an Emergency Plan to reinforce the National Health Service that we want and we will do everything to materialise it. A Plan that aims to immediately increase the Health Budget for 2020 investment by at least 25%; for the admission of professionals in shortage in the services and their professional, wage, career improvement and ending with the precariousness of employment relationships; the increase in the number of beds in the hospital network; for the strengthening of the public healthcare structure that proved to be crucial in combating the epidemic outbreak and for the constitution of a strategic reserve of medicines and personal protective equipment.

This plan is all the more urgent since the National Health Service has proved and seen acknowledged its irreplaceable role, and all the more necessary since it is also needed to respond to delays in the treatment of other pathologies and to recover thousands of surgeries, diagnostic tests and treatments.
We know that the economic groups that are engaged in the disease business and have remained hidden from the virus during these months now want to call upon themselves the business opportunity of delays, and where they do not reach, they send a message through their political representatives who do everything to denigrate and discredit the NHS.

We cannot accept that the funding that the NHS needs to guarantee the right to healthcare for all Portuguese people falls in other hands and serves other ends.

We know that the virus does not attack everyone equally. Those who are forced to work in miserable health and safety conditions and those who have to travel by public transport to work are more exposed.

It is necessary to improve the offer in public companies on some train lines. But serious and unsustainable are the road connections operated by the main private transport companies, some that resort to lay-offs, resist increasing the offer and do not adopt the necessary safety measures.

It is necessary to put an end to this situation that denies the right to transport and jeopardises the health of thousands of users, particularly workers.

But if these are combats that we must continue to take in our hands, we need to strengthen positions at the forefront of combating other viruses that erode our collective life and that we need to prevent from spreading and reverse them.

Some are old and survive, despite knowing they exist and how to end them.

We speak of the structural deficits accumulated in the country over decades of right-wing policies implemented by successive PS, PSD and CDS governments, which privatised strategic sectors, destroyed national productive capacity, reduced public investment, weakened essential public services, imposed precarious labour and low wages, promoted exploitation and increased external dependency.

A whole reality that has fragilised and weakened Portugal and that now the epidemic outbreak exposed in all its harshness, adding problems to the serious problems that the country was already facing.

The impacts of the epidemic are very visible in the reality of the country and in the lives of the Portuguese and of all those who, with their work, try to find a path for their lives in our country.

There are hundreds of thousands of workers under lay-off, several thousands of dismissals, a brutal cuts in wages, unilateral changes in working times, the imposition of forced vacations and withdrawals of rights, including the denial of the use of maternity and paternity rights, arbitrary impositions on working conditions, liquidation of the activity of thousands of micro, small and medium-sized companies and small producers, in the conditioning of productive activity and the flow of production.

Difficulties on top of difficulties for workers and other layers of the population, while at the same time multinational companies, with billions of profits, are pocketing public money namely by resorting to lay-off. It is the large companies and not the micro and small companies, that benefit the most from the lay-off artifice, they represent more than 50%! Companies, many of them, that benefit from millions of euros of public support for their projects, and we are not talking about the billions of euros that have already been poured into the Novo Banco which should be in the hands of the Portuguese people, or of the many millions on PPPs.

The workers and our people are hit by the effects of the epidemic and they are used because of it.

These are problems that need to be addressed, because they carry the virus of labour exploitation and the impoverishment of the people and which is now intensifying and spreading. The virus that continues to impose and perpetuate the law of the jungle in labour relations. This virus cannot roam free and it is urgent to confine it with the struggle of the workers, of our people and our determined and firm intervention, for effective solutions to the problems that have been created.

We are all aware that there is a complex public health situation, but this cannot justify the limited and insufficient response by the PS minority government to the serious economic and social situation, nor the maintenance, in essence, of the criteria and options of the right-wing policy for that response, in favour of monopoly groups and contrary to the interests of the workers, the people and the country.

A response that remains below the needs and possibilities with the announced measures contained in the so-called "Economic and Social Stabilisation Programme" presented this week by the government.

It fell short of the response required to combat the growth of the unemployment virus. From the outset, not assuming the prohibition of dismissals during this period or the replacement of the bonds of all the workers meanwhile dismissed.

The measure to ban dismissals was of elementary justice. And don't come up with the excuse that small businesses were forced to suspend their activity and that everything was inevitable.

There was a solution. What is needed is to ensure support for micro, small and medium-sized companies that need it, with due supervision, and not to open the door to exploitation by economic and financial and multinational groups.

Yes, if we want to prevent the destruction of micro, small and medium-sized companies, we need to ensure support for their treasury, the lifting of existing restrictions on already decided support, access to interest-free credit and without intermediation from private banks, cuts in costs of energy and fuel.
For this reason, it also fell short of the response required to ensure 100% pay to all workers when deciding to extend the lay-off.

The guarantee of 100% pay is not only a fair measure for those who are totally available to work full time, but also necessary to avoid growing recession.
Yes, it is necessary to affirm that the main and most important condition for the economic recovery is the defence of the economic fabric and the guarantee and valorisation of wages, pensions and income of the workers and people.

We took note of the approximation regarding the proposals that we have been fighting for, such as the increase in the proportion of wages paid in lay-off situations, such as the suspension of Advance Payment for MSMEs, as well as support for managing partners, such as improving the conditions of access to unemployment benefit and the Social Insertion Income (RSI), the occasional increase of the family allowance, but we are far from what is necessary to take a different course and face the difficult situation that many Portuguese face.

The decision by the PS, with the support of the PSD and CDS, of not combating precariousness has resulted in what we are witnessing. Thousands of workers with expired contracts, workers on trial period or working on a daily or hourly basis, fake self-employed, workers in temporary employment agencies, were turned into disposable parts and many, certainly many, were left without any means of subsistence and every day raise the already worrying pockets of poverty and must be helped urgently.

The PCP tabled a solution in the Assembly of the Republic - the creation of an additional social support provision of 438 euros for all those who were left without any means of subsistence and have no answer in the current support scheme. In line with our initiative, the government welcomed it for the self-employed, but left out many workers, some with atypical and unsolved labour ties. We need to continue to strive to ensure a broader application!

The response to those who are exposed to high-risk situations is postponed. Healthcare, civil protection, security forces, other sectors of central administration and local government who, during this epidemic, worked under risk and who have a permanent risk activity and wait for the salubrity, hardship and risk allowances to be finally applied in the public and private sectors. There is the idea of a future consideration of the proposal tabled by the PCP, but here too, it must not fall on deaf ears!

Culture, drowned in a sea of problems, with thousands of workers and bodies from the arts and culture, experiencing a dramatic situation. What is proposed, forced by the struggle, goes little beyond what was already programmed.

And if we are here today clearly stating, in the fight against the epidemic, not a single right less, it is also necessary to reaffirm that in the fight against injustice and inequalities it is necessary to go further. It is necessary to keep alive the flames of the struggle for the general increase in wages and the valorisation of careers and professions, as well as the repeal of the grievous norms of labour legislation, and in particular the expiry of collective bargaining and the replacement of the principle of more favourable treatment.

And this needs a strong fight against the virus that erodes citizenship, the exercise of freedoms, all freedoms and all rights, including the freedom and right to demonstrate as a normal act, the right to strike, to exercise trade union activity in companies, to protest. Freedoms, like rights, are defended by exercising them and these cannot be confined, let alone conditioned and tied in a straitjacket and in the trap of a deceptive and non-existent security. Therefore, from here we salute all those who fight all over the country, from the Algarve in the JJW group hotels to the Sines Industrial Complex against the dismissals, together with the workers of Culture who affirm their fair protest, the transport workers, the nurses, the CTT postal workers, the workers with precarious ties in RTP television, and those of Local Administration, among others.

We are under no illusions regarding the effectiveness of the Stabilisation Programme with its insufficient short-term measures to immediately contain and prevent the foreseeable dangers that are present in the Portuguese reality, namely: the risks of bankruptcies; the significant cut in the population's purchasing power and avoid its negative social and economic impacts; the limitations in public services that prevent the response that would now be required and necessary; processes of even greater concentration and centralisation of capital.

Accepting as inevitable the limited reach of this Stabilisation Programme, the idea is spread that the great solution to national problems is there, finally and ready. It is trumpeted far and wide in Europe and here also that there is a fund touted as a bazooka of 750 billion euros to support the economic recovery resulting from COVID.

The fireworks are huge, as it should, for the brightness and the noise of the firecrackers to overshadow the true nature of what is on the move, prepared and cooked by the Franco-German axis.

They say over and over again that most of it is handed as grants to the States, but conceal that what they are thinking is that the payment of the loan that supports the Fund will be guaranteed later by each country, either through an already suggested increase in contributions, or through the creation of "European taxes". Yes, what they are thinking about is giving an advance payment on future payments, with the aggravation of undermining new slices of national sovereignty, in terms of taxes, in the definition of an industrial development policy under the shadow and in the name of an artificial European sovereignty. What they have in mind is to take the opportunity to impose a further deepening of the integration process, not only to drain national competencies, but the financial resources of each country in a "Fiscal Union", centralised and under their control and to serve their interests and projects.

That the problems facing the country require robust measures and long-term responses to face an absolutely extraordinary situation is unquestionable. A different problem is to know if what is pointed out, with the macroeconomic and political conditionings and constraints that frame such a fund, is also still dependent on approval, is able to guarantee the answer and overcome the country's major problems.

Portugal needs to launch a real development programme for the country, but not a programme dictated by the criteria and agenda chosen and guided by the great powers of the European Union to serve their interests and the interests of the large multinationals. A true recovery and development programme requires making sovereign options, holding in its hands the appropriate instruments and not dependent on the criteria and decisions of third parties. It needs its own agenda that looks at the country's problems without conditionings or constraints.

Portugal needs to keep in mind and not forget the important lessons that can be learned from the current situation and that cannot be ignored in the future. Lessons that point to the need to ensure an alternative, patriotic and left-wing policy: the importance of the role of the workers and the centrality of work in society; the role of public services and, in particular, of the National Health Service; the valorisation of the domestic market; the importance of national production and the need for the country not to forego the goal of ensuring its food sovereignty and holding the strategic sectors in the hands of the country. The lessons of the wrong options that constitute the subordination of budgetary policy to the impositions of the European Union; the problems that result from the absence of monetary and budgetary sovereignty, with the country once again being pushed towards the blackmail of the financial markets.

This is the time to acknowledge that the way forward is by complying with the Constitution of the Republic and not against it. That 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. Purchase the equipment that the country needs, build infrastructure, ensure essential public services.

Yes, we need an alternative policy that promotes a turning point in national life.

The alternative that cannot dispense ensuring the country's liberation from submission to the Euro and the European Union, renegotiating public debt to free resources for its development. A policy of fiscal justice and combating the privileges of big capital. An alternative to ensure the defence of the democratic regime, the fight against corruption and the implementation of an independent and accessible justice for all.

Yes, an alternative policy is needed to guarantee the affirmation of a free and sovereign Portugal!

There have been many events that reveal the exploitative, predatory, oppressive and aggressive nature of capitalism. But the current pandemic has exposed it globally in a brutal way, reinforcing the just reasons for our struggle and our everlasting combat.

Its inhumane character was soon evident in the response that was lacking in the sanitary and medical plans in many important capitalist countries and dramatically visible in the main capitalist power - the USA -, where the value of life not only came second, but was systematically neglected.

Exploitation, injustice, inequality, discrimination, racism are there, as the last few days have shown.

In terms of healthcare, with policies aimed at promoting the private business of disease, millions of people have been left to fend for themselves, without the means and conditions to defend their health.

The scenes of the dramas of large masses are unlikely to be erased from the memory of every man and every people.

But what COVID-19 made very clear was the exploitative and predatory nature of capitalism, with the worsening inequalities and injustices existing at the level of each country and globally, intensifying exploitation, pushing millions of people to rely on food support and into extreme poverty, while large multimillion-dollar interests and large economic groups parasitize public funds, accelerating the centralisation and concentration of capital.

By crudely revealing its true nature, capitalism gave, during this health crisis, yet another example of its inability to serve Humanity.

The epidemic and its own options in facing it show that the nature of capitalism remains unchanged, invariably oppressive and exploitative.

Yes, there is a new world to be built, but it will only emerge and be made possible through the struggle and determination of workers and peoples.

The current situation demands the affirmation of the objectives and the role of the PCP, the materialisation of its everlasting commitment to the workers and people, which it is necessary to continue to translate into action and concrete intervention in the steadfast defence of their interests and which are the reason to be of our Party.

Regardless of the necessary protection measures, this is the emergency moment for the Party's action inherent to its communist identity. The workers and our people know that they can count on the PCP, whatever the circumstances. It was so in the past, so it will be in the future. This Party never stopped or allowed itself to be paralysed in the face of the most difficult hurdles that life at the service of the people imposed on it.

We have much work ahead of us. To monitor the political situation and ensure the initiative corresponding to our responsibilities. This requires a Party to function and intervene at all levels, taking the exceptional measures that are necessary, including those aimed at strengthening it. To give strength to the action «Not a single right less, confidence and struggle for a better life», prepare the Avante! Festival, assessing the current circumstances and taking health protection measures, reinforcing the Party organisation with the creation of new company cells, promoting the national funding campaign «The Future has a Party», promoting the celebrations of the centennial of our Party, disseminating its proud and unique history and the topicality of its ideals and its emancipatory project.

But this is also an exceptional time of work because we have in hand the holding of our XXI Congress and its implementation cannot dispense with the contribution, analysis, opinion, proposal of each and every one of the militants. A Congress thinking and responding to the problems of the workers, the people and the country.

The Portuguese Communist Party is this great collective that acts, decides, reflects, always with an individual contribution, in an unparalleled democratic process. So it is, it is and will be in the preparation of the XXI Congress, which will take place on the 27th., 28th. and 29th. November 2020, under the motto «Organise, Fight, Advance - Democracy and Socialism».

We fight for a patriotic and left-wing policy. We fight for an advanced democracy with the values of April in the future of Portugal. We always fight, every day, on all fronts for the construction of a society free from exploitation and oppression, for socialism and communism, always, but always, linked to the workers and the Portuguese people, to their aspirations, with the confidence and determination that is based on the strength of hope, the strength of struggle, the strength of the people.

It is looking ahead and with confidence in this great and coherent Party that we continue our struggle today!

Long live the Portuguese Communist Party!