Luís Montenegro emphasizes that “we didn’t make the most of it” European Union funds (EU) since 2000.
Portugal must have the “mentality of someone who wants to be at the front” of the European Union and abandon the mentality of being a country “always waiting for help”said the Prime Minister Luis Montenegrorefusing to be eternalized “a situation of dependence” from Portugal.
Luis Montenegrowho spoke at the conference ‘Europe, what future?’integrated into the cycle ‘RTP Conferences – Civil Society’said that “we really have to set as a national objective that we stop being a country of cohesion, we have to have as an ambition for Portugal to be a net contributor to the European Union and to be in solidarity with those who arrive again” to the EU.
For this, “We need to make very judicious use of the funds at our disposal. We have to make this self-criticism: we didn’t take enough advantage of [os fundos europeus]we should have better results today compared to the support we have had in recent years” and we must look for the implementation of PRR and PT2030 community funds like this “spirit of self-criticism”.
The Prime Minister added that we must have “a country that invests strategically and not thinking about the immediate effect, as sometimes happens, on what we have to spend the money on” so as not to lose it: “this is not the mentality of someone who wants to be at the front”.
Growths
Luis Montenegro recalled that when Portugal joined the then European Economic Community (in 1986), its wealth per inhabitant (GDP per capita) was 58% of the European average and today is 75%, highlighting that the country’s greatest enrichment occurred until the year 2000, when it reached 71%.
This “this means that the pace of approximation in the first 15 years was brutal and the pace of the following 20/25 was practically stagnation”he said, adding that the country “you cannot immortalize this trajectory” should aspire “being on the front line”.
Photo © PSD in: portugal.gov
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