The SDP chairman believed that the “great friends of private companies” were the “socialists, communists and blocs” responsible for the “abandonment” of the public education and health care systems.
“In education, as elsewhere in health care, the best friends of the private medical and educational companies are the socialists, communists and blocists who, by rejecting public systems, public schools and public health institutions, are pushing people to offer a private system,” said Louis Montenegro .
The Social Democratic leader was speaking on Friday evening in Amarante, Porto district, at a dinner marking the 10th anniversary of the PSD/SDS coalition winning local power.
According to the leader, “only those who have money go to the private sector, and those who do not have money remain at the gates of hospitals, the gates of clinics and the gates of schools where there are no teachers.”
He previously noted that in the field of private education “there is not a single vacancy in the entire country,” adding that “in secondary education alone, 22% of Portuguese students are already studying in private schools.”
Montenegro stressed: “Whoever ruled Portugal in recent years, it was not a liberal party, it was not a neoliberal party, with a scary right, Portugal was ruled by socialists, communists and blockers.”
According to the PSD president, “Portugal is suffering from the consequences of incompetence, lack of strategic sense, lack of transformative courage of PS governments,” given that in 2015, when the PSD left the government, the country was “better off than now” in a number of areas, such as education and healthcare.
“In health care today there are more Portuguese without a family doctor than in 2015, since today half the money is spent on the system, we had response capacity, better user access to the National Health System than exists today in Portugal”, defended.
In public schools, there was no “beginning of the school years when there was no shortage of teachers,” “results in core subjects were much better,” and there were no “teachers in open war with the tutelage,” he said.