The country’s “President of affections” as he is called – for the enthusiastic way he treats almost everyone he comes into contact with – President Marcelo has admitted that levels of poverty in Portugal leave him feeling “ashamed” – very possibly deeply, though he didn’t use that prefix.
In the same way that he tried to promote a feeling of solidarity when he visited gypsy families left homeless after a recent tornado in Faro (click here), the country’s head of State sounded a call for a “national strategy as a matter of urgency”, writes Público.
“We have to be able to reach society in Portugal with the following message: no-one is happy, or can be happy, pretending that poverty doesn’t exist alongside them”, he said in a closing speech at a conference on poverty at the Gulbenkian Foundation – disagreeing completely that “growth” will somehow magic issues away by creating jobs that will “eventually arrive for the poorest of the poor”.
Poverty is the “national shame” we carry as one of the “most unequal countries in Europe”, he insisted, and thus it is “urgent to join to growth and employment an autonomous national strategy to combat poverty once and for all, not waiting that one day economic progress will reach those that at that time, or maybe not, will remain among the living, or whose poverty is such that a complete recovery is unviable”.
Just as he said in Faro two week ago, total inclusion is the only approach compatible with the Portuguese Constitution.
“We have to decide what we want”, he told his audience.
“We cannot wait for future crises and so waste the time we have now”.
“The Azores finished a public consultation process about its national strategy in January. Isn’t it time we moved forwards with a national strategy of own?”
Marcelo has been on a mission since he took over the presidency in 2016, always pushing for people to somehow realise their best.
A regular visitor of homeless shelters in Lisbon he has no illusions when it comes to the levels of poverty on our streets.
Indeed, he said it could be that we need a ‘secretary of state for the eradication of poverty’.
Recounting dismal European statistics, he stressed that the only countries with worse levels of poverty are Bulgaria, Romania and Greece.
It’s time for a “collective notion of responsibility. We shouldn’t waste more time”, he said. “In the end it’s a race against the clock to ensure we don’t end up like other societies… suffering from populism, xenophobia, insecurity and fear”.
natasha.donn@algarveresident.com
Photo: © 2016-2018 Presidência da República Portuguesa
