President calls for dialogue “in times of trenches”; courage to make “difficult choices” – Portugal Resident

Portugal’s president António José Seguro has given his first Portugal Day speech today, calling for “dialogue in times of trenches”, the courage to make difficult choices – and the need to tackle the housing crisis before the country loses even more young people to the lack of opportunities.

Portugal “cannot wait for miracles”, he said.

“The state and businesses have to understand that the labour market has not yet learnt how to adequately reward knowledge and innovation. And this is unacceptable. We have to alter it.

Portugal needs policies that keep talent at home, “instead of exporting it; salaries that reflect productivity and the qualifications of Portuguese workers; a housing market that allows young people to construct a life in the country where they were born and studied; a state that simplifies instead of complicates; that anticipates, instead of reacts; that plans beyond its mandate, instead of just firefighting the present.”

In the eyes of right-wing CHEGA, this was a speech ‘full of warnings’ that will have had the prime minister’s “ears on fire”.

“Everything we heard from the President of the Republic is what we (CHEGA) have been defending for the country”, parliamentary leader Pedro Pinto told journalists afterwards. António José Seguro wants “a country with quality; with good salaries and a lot of work.”

The president didn’t just dwell on national issues, however. He defended peace, human rights and the United Nations Charter, as well as a “balanced relationship” with allies

“European strategic autonomy” is compatible with “transatlantic defence,” he said, adding: “Autonomy does not mean isolation. It means freedom of decision and responsibility, improving, updating, and strengthening bilateral cooperation with our allies.”

At the military ceremony on the very island where Lajes Air Base is located, the head of state and supreme commander of Portugal’s Armed Forces noted that the Azores are “at a strategic point in the relationship between Europe and the American continent, between the North Atlantic and the major maritime and air routes that structure the global order.”

“For all these reasons, it is a place that compels us to assume special responsibilities and duties, within the framework of the full affirmation of our sovereignty, our interests, and our strategic future. Always with mutual respect for what has been agreed, whether with a country or with the international community and the United Nations Charter. And in my view, one situation is not separate from the others,” he stated in the opening part of his speech, framing “the present and future of Europe and North America” as “dimensions of the same security community, with NATO as its fundamental pillar,” and the Atlantic as “part of European strategic autonomy from a political, economic, energy, technological, security, and defence perspective.”

“We are living in a time of trenches”

Warning that “we are living in a time of trenches” in which “the anxieties we feel in the economy, in geopolitics, in the safety of cities, in the protection of the most disadvantaged, in the very concrete issues of people’s real lives, create this impulse to close ranks, to choose a side, to build walls (…) We are increasingly lacking the words of the middle.”

“Those that are not born between walls, but in open spaces. Those that are neither besieged nor besiege, but that open up as an invitation to dialogue and encounter”.

Words of the middle  “are more about tolerance than exclusion, more about availability than withdrawal (…) they are what allow closeness, the creation of bridges between people, between Portuguese citizens, between institutions, between ideas. They are the antidote to the virus of polarisation that tends to replace argument, debate and negotiation.”

Considering the endless political debates at home; the clear polarisation between left and right – and the more often than not ‘breakdown of negotiations’ that create impasses, the president’s words were timely, heavy and challenging.

CHEGA wasted no time in reacting, but other parties have been more circumspect. There was a lot to unpack here.

One person who found no problem giving an opinion, however, was President Seguro’s predecessor, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who is in the Azores for this special day in Portugal’s calendar.

Marcelo told reporters: “(It was) an exceptional speech; exceptional for what he said, exceptional in the way that he said it…”

Source material: LUSA/ Correio da Manhã