Participation in the meeting of leaders of the parties that make up the Confederal Group of the European Unified Left/Nordic Green Left - The Left in the European Parliament, which takes place today in Brussels, is yet another opportunity to value the role and contribution that the PCP makes, also in this space, to the struggle for another Europe of cooperation among sovereign States with equal rights, of social progress and peace, respecting labour and social rights, of the environment, which fights all discrimination, inequalities and injustices and fights an increasingly neoliberal, militarist and federalist European Union.

I would also like to value the unique and relentless intervention of PCP’s MPs in the European Parliament. An intervention that places the main problems of the workers and people at the centre of their initiative, which seeks to respond here and in the country to the increasing problems regarding wages and pensions, purchasing power, access to healthcare or housing.

We do not ignore the series of serious and unacceptable developments that command national political life. But the priority is to find a solution to what negatively affects the life of the population, not feed speculations and scenarios but address the root of the problems, which seek the continuity of the policy that has united PS, PSD, CDS, Chega and Iniciativa Liberal in everything that is essential to the economic groups.

This is also why the irreplaceable intervention in the European Parliament in defence of the workers, the people and the country is so important, in the intervention that its MPs carry out in Portugal, as proved by the actions“With you every day, your voice in the European Parliament”that for months have been carried out all over the country, promoting awareness of the national reality and pointing out solutions to the problems felt by the Portuguese people.

That is why we are here, that is what the workers and people expect from us. We are and will be their voice in the European Parliament, here we are every day to repudiate the continuous increases in interest rates by the ECB or the constraints imposed on the country through the Stability Pact; in the unyielding defence of national interests in the discussion on EU funds, the interests of agriculture, fisheries and national industry; to improve wages and uphold workers' rights; in defence of the environment and the railways - examples, among many others, of themes in which PCP MPs have had a prominent intervention.