These positions were transmitted by João Oliveira in the afternoon of the second of three days of the XNUMXst PCP Congress in Loures, Lisbon district.
A speech in which the parliamentary leader of the PCP defended that the strategy of the communists defined four years ago proved to be correct and in which he considered that his party achieved in negotiations with the minority governments of the PS “improvements in living conditions that will remain in history and that they are a pimple through the throat of big capital ”.
In the final part of an intervention of about ten minutes, the parliamentary leader of the PCP sought to leave two political guarantees about the future direction of its political force: “We will not be interpreters or performers of any melody written by the capital and its reactionary representatives, nor will we be the first violin of an orchestra conducted by social democrats ”.
Before the communist delegates, João Oliveira sought above all to justify the reasons that led the PCP to make viable by abstaining the Government's proposal for the State Budget for 2021.
The communist parliamentary leader then presented some of the measures that his group managed to introduce in the final version of the Budget proposal, highlighting matters such as investments in the National Health Service, the hiring of professionals for the security forces and for education, increases in lower pensions, XNUMX% lay-off, unemployment and risk subsidies, among others.
And he left it to be understood that other non-budget matters will still have to be fulfilled by the executive.
“We continue to fight for an increase in the national minimum wage higher than the one announced by the Government [659 euros], so that the burdensome norms of labor legislation are revoked and a general increase in wages is advanced, including the public administration”, pointed.
After claiming these “advances” in the Budget, João Oliveira sought to ensure that the Communist party, on the political level, “acted with total freedom and independence, distancing itself from the options that the Government took, but not wasting what the struggle of the workers and the intervention of the PCP allowed it to be achieved ”.
“There is no shortage of people who want to limit and condition the freedom and independence of the PCP, some looking for the party to serve as an instrument in their strategy to resume even more strongly the policy of exploitation and impoverishment interrupted in 2015; others seeking to condition the PCP in denouncing the right-wing policy options that compromise the country's future, ”declared the president of the Communist Parliamentary Group.
