It is forty years since the signing of the Treaty of Accession of Portugal to the European Economic Community, in 1985.
Portugal's inclusion in the EEC was conceived and implemented as an integral part of the counter-revolutionary process of monopolistic recovery that countered the path of equality, justice and social progress, economic development, national sovereignty and independence, peace and cooperation achieved and initiated by the Portuguese people with the April Revolution.
Based upon the right-wing policy pursued by successive PS, PSD and CDS governments – which now have the support of IL and Chega – Portugal's inclusion in the EEC, the Single Market and, subsequently, in the European Union – with its Economic and Monetary Union, Euro and Stability Pact – as well as the further steps of the European capitalist integration process, represented an attack and destruction of national productive capacity, foreign domination of the Country's strategic sectors, low wages and pensions, attacks on rights, deterioration and privatisation of public services, social injustices and inequalities, further concentration of wealth and plundering of national resources, consolidation of the country's structural deficits, foreign dependence, and a narrowing of Portugal's economic and trade relations. The creation of infrastructure and the development trends that have taken place in the meantime do not erase the essential aspect that characterises this process.
Despite the fierce propaganda regarding the EU, the truth is that sovereignty has been seriously compromised, with central issues in the Country's life being decided, or strongly conditioned, by the institutions and bodies of the European Union, dominated by the great powers and determined by the interests of the economic and financial groups.
The Stability Pact, in addition to the dictatorship of the deficit and debt - now heightened by the direct focus on containing or reducing public spending - the Budgetary Treaty, the European Semester, Economic Governance, are all tools aimed at containing public spending, especially on the social functions of the State, public services and public investment.
The many and repeated promises of wages and living conditions at the level of “Europe”, of the “frontrunner”, of the so-called “economic and social cohesion” within the EU, have crumbled into the reality of maintaining and deepening divergences, inequalities and asymmetries in development. The impacts of the troika's intervention between 2011 and 2015 are still vivid in the memory of the Portuguese people, and their consequences are still being felt negatively in the country.
Forty years after the signing of the Treaty of Accession of Portugal to the EEC, in a context in which it is facing profound contradictions and difficulties, the European Union insists on its neoliberal, federalist and militarist policies that not only attack workers' rights and their social achievements, sovereignty and democracy, but also promote a dangerous escalation of confrontation and war, including increased spending on arms, diverting billions of euros needed to solve social problems to war, with the serious risk of pushing Europe and the world towards catastrophe.
Reality discloses the many fallacies and hypocrisies of the European Union, which cynically calls for human rights, democracy and peace, but is complicit with the genocide of the Palestinian people at the hands of Israel. Or when it increasingly promotes and incorporates reactionary concepts and projects into its policies.
Having opposed this path of social injustice and national abdication from the outset, the PCP has not only never given up upholding national interests in the face of this process, but will continue to fight in defence of the interests of the workers, the people and the Country, for the affirmation of national sovereignty and independence, for a path of economic and social development that ensures the materialisation of the rights and aspirations of the Portuguese people, contributing to a Europe of cooperation between sovereign states with equal rights, social progress and peace.
