Legislative elections: PCTP/MRPP against “war economy” wants to block investment in Defense

In an interview with Lusa as part of the campaign for the legislative elections on 18 May, the general secretary of the Portuguese Communist Workers' Party ( PCPT/MRPP ) spoke out against what she classified as the "war economy", condemning the announced increases in investment in Defence, at national and European level.

“We know that Europe already has a plan, a rearmament plan, and that it will involve huge expenses, so the total amount will be 800 billion euros. How much will Portugal get?” he asked, adding that it is necessary “to know where the money is coming from.”

For Cidália Guerreiro, Portugal “is currently, effectively, a vassal” of Brussels and Washington.

"Brussels has already made the decisions we need to make and we just need to implement them. Saying that we are going to relaunch the economy through the military industry is a provocation, it cannot be any other way, because the military industry is for killing, it will not bring benefits to the people and we have an obligation, and that is why we are in these elections, to warn about these problems," he said.

To invest in Defense, for the PCTP/MRPP «there are only two ways: either through taxes, direct, indirect, fees, small fees and everything else that can be invented, or through cuts in social services». For the party, neither of these ways is acceptable.

The PCTP/MRPP, for example, highlighted that this year Germany “made changes to its own Constitution in order to develop these military industries” and to “become a great power within Europe, which had not happened since 1945”.

Still on the subject of armed conflicts, the Secretary-General criticised what she considers to be the Government's lack of position in relation to the war in Gaza and recalled that several countries have already taken positions in relation to "genocide" and refuse to be "conniving" with what is happening.

“The last thing that was said in the Assembly of the Republic was that it was not appropriate. Isn’t it appropriate for this country to take a position? The Portuguese have a position, the Portuguese don’t want it, they are against this genocide”, declared the secretary general of the PCTP-MRPP.

In the area of ​​Health, Cidália Guerreiro argued that the “transition from public to private has been painfully killing the National Health Service (SNS)”, which, she warned, has not benefited from the announced investments of the Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP). “At this moment, being born and dying is dramatic, especially being born”, she accused.

“We see that a pregnant woman, for example, never knows where she will have her child and she doesn’t even know if it will be born,” she said, adding that it is often said that “birth is a miracle and, in fact, here it begins to be a miracle.”

At the party level, Cidália Guerreiro said that the party, created on September 18, 1970, is working on an “internal reinforcement”, admitting financial difficulties, and criticized the system of fines applied by the Entity of Accounts and Political Financing.

In the 2024 legislative elections, the party ran and obtained 0.25% of the vote, corresponding to 15,491 votes.