The recent developments in the political situation are inseparable from a series of serious and unacceptable events that have involved the Government's action and the worsening of the problems arising from the lack of response to central issues regarding the lives of the workers and people.

What is needed are solutions to these problems and not the chorus of speculation about possible dissolutions or early elections. The current absolute majority is the result of an unjustified dissolution that was dramatized by the PS and with the collaboration of the President of the Republic.

For the PCP, which is prepared for all situations, what is needed, and a priority, is to respond to the problems that mark the day-to-day lives of the workers, pensioners and people. What is a priority is to increase wages and pensions, fight the loss of purchasing power by controlling and reducing the prices of essential goods and services, guaranteeing the right to housing by protecting leases, making banks pay the increase of the interest on housing loans, promote public housing, reinforce the National Health Service and the Public School, promote national production, ensure public control of strategic sectors, put an end to the criminal privatisation process of TAP.

What is needed is a change of policy, breaking with the right-wing policy options and guidelines that the PS Government pursues with the support of PSD, CDS, Chega and IL in everything that is essential for economic groups. What some aspire to is to continue this policy, either by the hand of the current Government, reshuffled or not, or by the hand of those who, criticizing and promoting deplorable acts, want nothing more than share a place in this policy of denial of rights, increase of exploitation and injustice, devaluation of public services, alienation of national interests.

As the PCP has stated, there are resources and potential, with an alternative policy and compliance with the Constitution, to ensure the sovereign development of the country.

The workers and the people can count, as they always have, on the PCP in the fight against injustice and exploitation and in building a better life in a Portugal of social progress.