Mr President, honourable Members,
Mr. Prime Minister, we leave this debate with the certainty that your budget and your policy must be defeated.
The more your propaganda and your policies advance, the more will remain to be recovered in the lives of those who work, those who have worked their entire lives, and the youth.
You sell illusions to these youth, but all you guarantee them is precariousness, even higher tuition fees, more fixed-term contracts, longer working hours, less time to live their lives, and wages so low that they seek a better life abroad that they cannot find here.
You, Mr. Prime Minister, do not want to see reality, but make no mistake, your decision to transfer the resources that are essential for improving the living conditions of the majority to a tiny minority will sooner or later blow up in your face.
These choices and this Budget are also supported by Chega and the Liberal Initiative, who are so confident of its approval that they can even afford to vote against it.
They feign this or that disagreement, but they only differ from the government in the intensity and pace of injustice.
Options made possible by the PS, which claims to disagree, but which agrees with them and makes them viable.
And it makes it viable even knowing that this Budget is not a piece of political stability, but rather of the stability of the current policy.
The policy of the Labour Package, of dismantling of the National Health Service and Public Schools, privatisations, assault on public resources, real estate speculation, injustice, and impoverishment.
It is the transformative agenda of growth for a few, justice for some, and financial stability always guaranteed for those who think they own everything.
The surplus agenda ignores the fact that the month far exceeds the increasingly short wages and pensions in the face of the brutal increase in the cost of living.
No one can say they are being misled, what is coming is bad.
Workers, and especially the youth and women, do not need more precariousness, more deregulation of their schedules and their lives, and they do not accept being disposable pieces, dismissed without just cause.
These days, and on November 8, in the National March against the labour package, the workers, especially the younger ones, are asserting their strength, their protest and their rejection of this behest from big business.
The country cannot waive €2 billion per year in public resources that your cut of the tax on profits to 17% will deliver to economic groups.
What the workers and the people need is for existing resources to be used to increase wages, valorise careers, respect workers and set the national minimum wage at €1,050 from 1 January.
What they need is for VAT on electricity, gas and telecommunications to return to 6% and take measures to regulate the brutal cost of food.
The Country does not need the budget to once again hand over €1.8 billion in tax benefits (IRC-Corporate Income Tax) to large companies.
What the Country needs is to significantly increase pensions by 5%, by a minimum of €75 per month.
Because every month, pensioners face fixed costs for housing, food and medicines.
The National Health Service cannot afford to have half of its budget going to those who turn disease into a business.
People, especially parents and children, do not accept the lack of doctors and the closure of services and emergency rooms.
The National Health Service's money must be used to strengthen its capacity, to valorise careers and wages, and to retain and attract professionals to guarantee family doctors and nurses and the functioning of services.
The Country cannot afford to transfer €1.5 billion to fund Public-Private Partnerships. What is needed is to rescue the concessions and free the Country from this burden so that it can invest in what is needed.
The Country does not need the Budget to allocate another €1.9 billion to non-habitual residents. Those who live and work here every day need those millions to be spent on public housing, to face the rents and curb housing prices.
The Country cannot destroy State structures in science, culture or the environment, it cannot hand over TAP to foreign capital and dismantle CP.
The Country's resources are not unlimited, but what the millions that the Budget transfers to large economic groups and multinationals show is that there are sufficient resources which, if distributed more fairly, can ensure a better life for the majority and enable the construction of nurseries and care homes, combat poverty, defend the forest and promote national production.
The Country is not self-sufficient, but it can and must produce more and import less. It can and must assume itself as a sovereign Country and not a province of the European Union.
The Country needs a new course to serve those who work, the youth who want to study, work and live here, the children and the nurseries they are entitled to, small entrepreneurs and farmers, scientists, artists, retirees and pensioners.
It is to all of them, for the majority, that we are committed.
