Lisbon, Jan. 3, 2025 (Lusa) - The Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) accused the government on Friday of wanting to impose wages in 2025 that deepen inequalities, considering them insufficient in the face of a new rise in prices, and that the country needs a new policy in the new year.
At a press conference at the PCP's national headquarters in Lisbon, Communist leader Margarida Botelho listed a number of essentials - such as bread, milk, coffee, eggs and meat - whose prices are rising with the start of the new year.
‘These increases are in addition to those of recent years. Compared to 2021, the average price level has risen by 16.1%, but if we look at household spending on food, the difference is 27% more, and with housing, electricity, water, gas and other fuels, it's more than 17.7%,’ she said.
In this context, the member of the Secretariat and Political Commission of the PCP Central Committee said that ‘wages are low and the economic groups and the governments at their service do everything they can to limit their increase’.
‘The salaries that the government and big business are trying to impose for 2025 further deepen injustices and inequalities, which are evident in the volume of profits of the main 19 economic groups: €32 million in profits per day, with emphasis on the accumulation by the banks,’ she criticised.
Margarida Botelho argued that this situation is due to previous government policies that are now ‘continued and accentuated by the PSD and CDS, which have the support of Chega and the Liberal Initiative (IL) and the complicity of the PS’.
For the PCP leader, ‘the need to increase wages and pensions is becoming more urgent with each passing day, in a country where almost two million people, including 300,000 children, live below the poverty line, and one million pensioners have pensions below €510’.
Margarida Botelho argued that ‘what the country needs in this new year is a new policy’, insisting on measures that were the party's flagships in 2024, such as increasing the minimum wage to €1,000, pensions by at least 5% or regulating prices in telecommunications or energy.
‘Raising wages and pensions well above the price of inflation, regulating the prices of goods and services, valuing careers and professions and dignifying work, regulating and reducing working hours, eradicating precariousness and promoting full employment are essential factors for improving the living conditions of our people,’ she said.
The PCP leader said that to achieve these measures, ‘the struggle of the workers and the people’ will be decisive, recalling that in the past, it has also been possible to ‘ensure regulated energy and gas tariffs, achieve a reduction in the price of intermodal transport passes’ or, in 2024, end the tolls on the ex-SCUTs.
‘In 2025, with the struggle, it will be possible to defend rights, increase salaries and pensions, safeguard and strengthen public services,’ she said, affirming that “the workers and the people know that they can count on the PCP in this new year in the initiative, in the proposal and in the struggle for a better life”.
When asked how the PCP proposes to maintain a balanced budget, including raising the minimum wage to €1,000, Margarida Botelho replied that it's a question of political choice.
‘Do we want to continue a policy of favouring the concentration of more profits in economic groups that aren't exactly in difficulty, or do we choose to distribute the wealth that has been created better, through salaries and pensions or by increasing public salaries?’ she asked.
TA/ADB // ADB.
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