Against interference and disaster For patriotic and left-wing policies
The PCP strongly condemns the Government's formalisation of a request to activate the European Financial Stabilisation Fund – a mechanism associated to the IMF. This decision was absolutely contrary to the interests of Portugal, its workers and its people. It is inseparable from the pressures that have recently been brought to bear on the Portuguese people. It is the direct result of directives from those who actually run the country: banks and the major economic and financial corporations, in association with foreign capital. It is a decision that has revealed that it is the banks that are in charge, and that the right-wing policy parties just obey. It is a decision that once again showed that the PS, PSD and CDS parties – submissive as they are to Euoropean Union impositions – are merely a political expression of the interests of economic powers, basically implementors of policies to plunder national resources.
Contrary to the ideological campaign that has been mounted to justify that initiative, the PCP reasserts that resorting to this mechanism is not a form of “aid”, but rather a threat. Were it to be implemented, it would become a fresh aggression against working people's rights, and a new and even more serious amputation of national sovereignty. Similarly to what has already happened in other countries that have resorted to European Union and IMF foreign financial intervention, it will bring with it more unemployment, poverty and exploitation, and turn into even more economic recession and more foreign endebtedness, without solving the problems – that they hypocritically purport to want to curb – of speculation and public debt interest rates.
The PCP reasserts that this intervention is not needed, nor would it be needed if our country had patriotic attitudes and policies on the part of the PS Government and of those – PSD, CDS and President of the Republic – who, side by side with them, have used Stability and Growth Programmes and State Budgets to drag the country into the current national disaster situation.
There was, and there is, an alternative to the road of right-wing policies, to the European Union capitalist integration process, and to this further interference in our country's affairs. As the PCP has stated, what would be necessary and urgent to confront the unsustainable and illegitimate rise in the public debt would be to: immediately renegotiate the public debt with respect to deadlines, interest rates and sums to be paid; approach other countries that are also in the crosshairs of capitalists' speculation with a view to coordinated action in respect of the EU; enact policies geared toward economic growth and protecting national production; diversify sources of financing and trade relations; renegotiate the so-called Public-Private Partnerships.
This announcement comes at a time when the Portuguese people will again get their say through elections, and can choose to make a break with the current direction in national events. It is therefore all the more illegitimate, insofar as it binds Portugal to social retrogression and economic decline for years to come.
The PCP rejects the foreign financial intervention announced by the Government yesterday, and will use all means at its disposal to fight it. We are therefore announcing an indignation and protest event: a rally next Saturday 9 April at 17:30 hours at Rua Augusta in Lisbon “Against interference and disaster, for a patriotic and left-wing policy”. Counting on the participation of many communists, the PCP appeals to all patriots and democrats that feel under aggression from this policy of injustice and national decline to participate in the rally and assert the demand for a different direction for Portugal.
The PCP furthermore considers that 5 June next, the date of the upcoming general election, will be an opportunity for the workers and the people to – by supporting and voting for the CDU – condemn all those who have bound Portugal to these policies and this decision, and to back the demand for a break and a change, for a and left-wing policy and government.
