Comrades

Subjected to a policy and to options subordinated to the interests of the monopoly capital and the European capitalist integration, Portugal has been dragged, over the last decades, by successive governments of the PS, PSD and CDS, into economic decline, social regression and dependency accompanied, on the political level, by the impoverishment of the democratic regime where the conflict with the Constitution of the Republic is the most visible element.

During the XIX Congress of our Party, we set down in the Political Resolution that the Portuguese democracy was facing new and more disturbing dangers.

This has eventually happened with an offensive directed against its more advanced and progressive elements, in a line of continuous confrontation and violation of the constitutional text looking for new excuses to disrespect it, to impoverish the democracy and to exterminate the democratic regime, as was the case of the introduction, under the pretext of the so-called "refoundation of the memorandum", a new phase aimed at subversion of the Constitution.

A Constitution that, despite its successive revisions, continues to be a fundamental text, of reference and with progressive content, and the guarantor of many rights, thus constituting a serious obstacle to those who want to destroy it. It maintains a program of development and full democracy in its various aspects: political, social, economic and cultural that very much bother those who defend a divergent path.

With the government of the PSD / CDS, the crisis has served as a justification to impose a set of unconstitutional measures that have attacked the rights of workers and degraded the social functions of the state, in a process of expanding inequalities and alienation of national sovereignty.

Those were the years when the subordination of the political power to the economic power was accentuated, simultaneously with the development of an operation of pressure and blackmail by means of which the European Union and national circles to it associated, tried to keep untouched the policies of exploitation, impoverishment and theft of natural resources, which have usurped the sovereign right of the Portuguese people to decide on their fate, thus taking the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic as an obstacle to the success of their offensive.

It was a period when the mass struggle took on a very significant dimension and was highlighted the irreplaceable role of the organized struggle of the workers and the people.

A struggle with two major objectives: to resist the offensive and defend the rights, but also as a factor of increasing the political awareness of an urgent and undelayable rupture with the right-wing politics and the construction of a patriotic and left-wing policy.

It was the mass struggle and a determined and consequent intervention of the PCP that led to the defeat of the PSD / CDS Government and a change in the correlation of forces in the Assembly of the Republic, thus paving the way for a new phase of our national political life. The possibility now open, of taking steps, although limited, to reverse the course of decline imposed on the Portuguese, a possibility not to be missed, and that makes even more evident the indispensable goal of expanding the fight for a breach with right-wing politics and the construction of a political, patriotic and leftist alternative and of the political alternative that will led to it.

As the Secretary-General of our Party has said in his opening speech, "the choice is not between conforming to constraints and difficulties, and going backwards. The option is to take new steps forward. The option is to break with the right-wing policy and adopt a patriotic and left-wing policy."

The achievement of this objective, we are struggling for, depends, above all, on the information, political awareness, organized force, will and action of the workers' and popular movement.

But this is also a moment for the convergence and unity of the patriots, the left wing men and women, the workers and the people, in defense of the values of April, in defense of the Constitution of the Republic, demanding a break with the right-wing policy and the affirmation of a patriotic and left-wing alternative, and insisting on the primacy of national interests.

Not only is the CRP a conditioning factor against the attacks on the people’s rights, it is also a factor for legitimizing the struggle. It equally maintains principles and provisions that can be used as guidelines for economic and social policies capable of, if in the hands of a patriotic and leftist government, regain solutions and perspectives of democratic and social dimension.

An alternative inseparable of the development of the mass struggle, the broadening of the convergence of all the patriots and democrats identified with this objective, the strengthening of the social and political influence of the PCP, and which demands from our Party an intervention that contributes to make clear to the workers and the people, that the discouragement, disbelief, lack of hope, abstention, and the withdrawal from the political and electoral choices, that can best defend the interests of the people from right-wing politics, would only help the continuation of the same right-wing politics.

We request the workers, the democrats and patriots, the people, to believe in their own strength and to converge on the goal of recovering for the Portuguese people the right to decide on the course we want for our country and to react against discouragement and resignation."A people does not die because it is oppressed, but it will surely die if, it renounces to fight.“

Long live the Portuguese Communist Party