BE coordinator Mariana Mortagua said this Saturday that Luis Montenegro “fired the teachers,” alluding to the PSD/SDS-PP government under Pedro Passos Coelho, and accused him of not being consistent with the positions he held in the past.
Mariana Mortagua spoke at a press conference at a hotel in Lisbon in the middle of a meeting of the National Council of the Left Bloc (BE) in response to a statement by the PSD president, who on Thursday held the left responsible for the degradation of the population’s education.
“There is a ghost from last Christmas who seems to have visited Luis Montenegro these days, and this ghost has come to tell him what he did when he fired the teachers, what he did when he had the opportunity, when he had the power in his hands the opportunity to return working time to teachers,” said the BE coordinator.
According to Mariana Mortagua, BE, on the contrary, “had a consistent position all along” in which it “consistently presented proposals for the restoration of the seniority of teachers, and which were not approved only because the PSD joined the PS to systematically reject these proposals” .
“I want to give assurance that on March 10 there will be a solution for teachers and work time will be returned to teachers and this return will be due to the strength of BE in this election,” he added.
The BE Coordinator specifically recalled the vote on “the BE proposal, at a time when there was no absolute majority on the part of the PS and when a PSD vote could have changed the situation and solved this illegality that happened to the teachers and which prevents the restoration of his time of service” in May 2019, and Luis Montenegro was also involved in this situation.
At that time, Rui Rio led the PSD, and Luis Montenegro was not its deputy. He left parliament in April 2018 after serving as parliamentary leader of the SDP between 2011 and 2017.
Regarding the costs associated with fully returning teachers’ time, Mariana Mortagua stated that “teachers’ time is not being returned not for financial reasons, but because of a lack of political will.”