PS leader criticises media focus on tiny minority
Thousands of people celebrated Liberty Day in Lisbon yesterday, on a day that was one of the three days of national mourning for the death of Pope Francis. And as reports stress, Portugal’s democracy is a work in progress, at a time when democracy is failing in many quarters of the globe.
Yesterday’s march, filling the main arteries of the capital was particularly important, as the country faces yet another round of legislative elections next month, and the ‘far right’ is still making ‘inroads’, to the point that yesterday a demonstration numbering only around 50 far right activities caused ‘local mayhem’, injuries to police, and saw a number of arrests.
Today’s newspapers have particularly featured the ‘confrontations’; the former magistrate among those arrested, but as PS leader Pedro Nuno Santos has said these were truly insignificant in faces of the multitude that turned out onto the streets to celebrate the Carnation Revolution of 1974 that overthrew decades of fascist dictatorship – and as such, the far right is massively outnumbered. “If anyone is fighting the far right, it is the parties that were walking down Avenida da Liberdade” yesterday, he told journalists, having stressed that “as far as the far right is concerned, I can only say that they talk a lot about order, but they are primarily responsible for disorder. So we shouldn’t take the far right so seriously. The police must do their job and enforce the law,” he added.
Source: LUSA
