BE and PCP criticize budget surplus due to deteriorating living conditions – Politics

BE and PCP criticized this Monday the 1.2% budget surplus recorded in 2023, considering that it “comes from the lack of response” to the population’s problems and the demands of various professional sectors.

The National Statistics Institute (INE) revealed this Monday that Portugal recorded a historic budget surplus of 1.2% last year, which exceeds the Ministry of Finance’s official forecast of 0.8%.

Speaking to journalists at the national headquarters of the PCP, in Lisbon, after a meeting with that party, the BE coordinator, Mariana Mortágua, highlighted that the management that the absolute majority of the PS made of public accounts had an impact “on the degradation of the conditions of social”.

“Part of this degradation of social conditions has precisely to do with public services that are being degraded, with wars that were fought with professionals essential to public services and to the country, ranging from the security forces to the SNS, doctors, nurses, diagnostic technicians , teachers, so many people”, he criticized.

For the leader of the BE, “the PS, while presenting increasingly larger surpluses and always beyond what it had predicted, planned, was denying the response to these very important sectors”, just as “it was denying a response to housing for access the health”.

“And that is one of the causes and one of the main elements of the diagnoses we make regarding this shift to the right: it is a discontent that is getting worse (…) when public accounts would allow responding to many of these demands”, he stated.

In the same vein, the general secretary of the PCP, Paulo Raimundo, argued that “the historical surplus comes from the lack of response to teachers, public services, the lack of doctors, the recognition and appreciation of careers, the response to judicial officials, of the Government’s capacity for public investment”.

“The result of disinvestment in people, in life, in public services, is transposed into this budget surplus. Have we become better? The country has become better, has everyone’s life been better with this budget surplus? No, it has become worse. We have gained little with this budget surplus”, he stated.

For Paulo Raimundo, “there was someone who got away with this budget surplus, and who will continue to do well, but people’s lives got worse.”

Asked whether the PCP would look bad if it did not now make an Amending Budget viable to increase the salaries of teachers, court officials, security forces and health professionals, Paulo Raimundo argued that it is necessary to ask “why these problems got to where they are”.

“There were financial conditions to respond to these problems. There was a clear choice from the PS, which was not to respond to the problems. That was the biggest problem. We could have avoided a set of problems in everyone’s lives if we had responded to these issues,” he said.

In these statements to journalists, the two party leaders were also questioned about the fact that the PSD had proposed the name of José Pedro Aguiar-Branco as president of parliament and Hugo Soares as parliamentary leader, but they refused to comment.