Challenges in the New Year for Portugal and for a New PSD – Observer
In the new year that has now begun, Portugal has three objectives that it must obligatorily fulfill.
Given the clear lack of vision, energy and creativity shown by the current government, I believe that it will be up to the PSD to ensure its implementation.
Moreover, the ability that the PSD demonstrates to assume this responsibility will depend on the renewal of its image, the reconquest of the trust of the citizens and, consequently, the demonstration of the effective capacity to conquer a New Majority in the next legislative elections.
1 The first objective is to fight the causes of our impoverishment, the reasons that followed the stagnation of the middle class in the last thirty years and the fact that our young people do not find reasons of hope to develop their life projects in Portugal.
The Portuguese do not vote for the PSD because it claims to be center-left, center-right or right-wing. On the contrary, the Portuguese vote for the PSD if they feel that it articulates a structured message and brings together personalities who defend guarantees, security and stability to solve their problems.
More important than spurious and distant exercises from the municipalities, the PSD has to be able to articulate a message that solves the country’s impoverishment problem, that defends a fiscal reform that frees companies and the middle class from the asphyxiation in which it finds itself and what a construction of conditions for the assertion of young people in Portugal.
In this sense, the PSD must defend an economic model that does not lead to excessive dependence on volatile sectors such as tourism or the low value-added real estate sector, which has accentuated Portugal’s path of impoverishment. On the contrary, it must articulate an economic model capable of attracting foreign investment and attracting sectors that introduce high levels of innovation, adding effective value to our economy and thus making it possible to reverse the downward trend.
Only in this way can we ensure that our economy is no longer based on a low-income model and aspires to economic growth that increases the quality of life of the Portuguese and allows young people to be offered the hope and security they have experienced to develop their life projects. in Portugal.
With the PSD, he has to formulate a reform of the tax system that is based on the principle of contributory capacity, freeing up income for families. Not only income, but also expenditure on health, education, and family support must be considered as instruments for effectively measuring the contributory capacity of citizens and families.
Families’ expenditures on day care centers, schools, health services, supermarkets, nursing homes for the elderly, for example, protect a galloping increase in recent years and cannot fail to be understood in a real way in the experience of the families’ ability to pay.
On the other hand, the provision of greater income to families should not be based on a welfare and conjunctural logic with the attribution of credits, but rather based on the freedom of citizens with a consistent decrease in the tax burden.
two The second objective is to reform the electoral system and the political system..
The distance between elected officials and voters, the lack of transparency in the exercise of duties, the confusing and strange accumulation of functions that a reform postponed since 1998 is finally implemented.
The Socialist Party has tried to ignore the need to carry out a true reform of the electoral and political system, perpetuating opacity and cronyism in the exercise of public functions.
It is therefore up to the PSD to take the lead in a crucial debate that Portuguese politicians have repeatedly refused to hold.
The PSD must defend an electoral system that allows greater identification between elected officials and candidates, reformulating the configuration of electoral districts, proposing the introduction of single-member constituencies with a national compensation circle that ensures the principle of proportionality.
It is equally critical to introduce greater transparency into the exercise of public functions by seriously reformulating the way in which public office holders are accountable to the Portuguese. Thus, as in other western democracies and even in the European Commission, the PSD must defend that any citizen appointed as a member of the Government submits to a prior hearing in Parliament allowing an effective scrutiny of each new member of the Government and avoiding the surprises that the recent months have offered us.
3 The third objective concerns the development of public policies that promote the social and economic cohesion of the territory. We are a small country in terms of geography, but still profoundly unequal.
It is impressive that five Portuguese municipalities (Lisbon, Gaia, Sintra, Porto and Cascais), in 2019 concentrated 21.6% of the total national purchasing power. If we add Oeiras and Loures to these five, they will have 26% of the total national purchasing power concentrated in just 1% of the national territory, with the municipality of Lisbon alone representing 9.6% of the total national purchasing power.
In this matter, the PS’s centralizing and conservative tendency has been clear, seeking to reduce Portugal to the Terreiro do Paço.
The PSD has, therefore, to demonstrate the experience of demanding a real reform promoting an effective administrative decentralization.
But it has to go further.
The difficulty that municipalities in the interior felt in securing staff in their territory requires measures that include the relocation of public administration services to low-density territories, allowing them to attract more critical mass to these territories and build a trajectory of influence of companies and attraction of paintings protected in these forgotten territories.
The relocation of public administration services to low-density territories must be accompanied by a thorough sweeping of public services, allowing citizens to access public administration services in an agile and efficient manner.
I don’t see myself in the preconceived idea that the PSD with a majority vocation has met its end of line. In fact, throughout its history, the PSD was not only able to deny the expectation of deterministic predictions regarding its uselessness in the party system, but also in moments of deep crisis, it proved its ability to regenerate.
However, I recognize that the PSD is at a critical moment in its history and that it has to develop a path that reverses the verification verified by the fact that in the last 28 years it has governed only 7 and in the last 38 season it has only won nine.
In this sense, the PSD in this new year has to make it clear which its position in Portuguese society and has to implement a profound alteration of its operating and organizational rules.
For many years now, the structure of the PSD has ceased to be attractive to young people, entrepreneurs, social and cultural agents and the most dynamic sectors of Portuguese society.
The PSD, based on deeply entrenched territorial structures, which, in some cases, do not represent local communities and are difficult for them, failed to prove to be an attractive space for thousands of Portuguese who have a decisive contribution to make to the country.
On the other hand, the PSD operates under the same terms as it was organized at the end of the eighties of the last century, not adapting to the new world that, however, has emerged.
It is therefore urgent that the PSD develops a statutory reform that will open up the party to supporters, attracting the most qualified in a logic of social, academic and business meritocracy, introducing the revolution of transparency in the definition of its policies, in the choice of its candidates, reconsider the method of election of its bodies, namely presenting electronic voting, reclassifies the National Congress as the central body in defining the strategy and declaration of the party, and organizes itself in spaces for sectoral discussion.
In a period in which the complexity of the challenges facing the country is of such an order, a reformist party that wants a majority vocation cannot remain closed in a house in Lapa with the same old methods, taking the same old decisions.
The PSD has to assert itself as a modern party, attractive to the most dynamic sectors of Portuguese society and to reaffirm itself as the only party in the non-socialist space capable of leading a majority that affirms freedom as a central principle of political action and equality of rights. equality opportunities as the beacon of its project for Portugal.
The current PSD leadership has managed to restore PSD confidence in itself. It now remains for him to restore the confidence of the Portuguese in the PSD.
If so, the deterministic predictions about the future of the PSD will continue to meet the same fate as the last 48 years bumping into reality.