Montenegro wants Portugal to be at the forefront of the EU and is critical of the use of funds.

This Thursday, the Prime Minister called it a “national goal” that Portugal will cease to be a country of cohesion and become a net contributor to the EU, arguing that only with self-criticism and wise investment of funds will it be able to achieve the “first package”.”

Luis Montenegro opened this Thursday the conference “Europe, what future?”, which is part of the series of “RTP/Civil Society Conferences” that takes place this Thursday at the Belem Cultural Center and celebrates Europe Day.

In her speech, Montenegro recalled that when Portugal joined the then European Economic Community, its GDP per capita was 58% of the European average, and today it is 75%, emphasizing, however, that the closest approximation was made before 2000. when it reached 71%.

“What this means is that the pace was brutal in the first 15 years, and then the pace was basically stagnant for the next 20 to 25 years,” he said.

The Prime Minister said the country “cannot continue on this path” and must “even be at the forefront.”

“We really must set ourselves a national goal – to stop being a country of cohesion, we must strive for Portugal to become a net contributor to the European Union, and be in solidarity with those who will come again,” he defended.

Otherwise, he warned, Portugal would maintain a “situation of dependency” and would be “always waiting for help.”

“To do this, we need to use the funds at our disposal very wisely. We must be self-critical: we did not use them enough, today we must have better results compared to the support we had. in recent years,” he said.

Montenegro said the country should approach the implementation of the PRR and PT2030 public funds with this “spirit of self-criticism.”

“A country that invests strategically and does not think about the immediate impact, as sometimes happens, where we have to spend money if we are not going to lose it: this is not the mentality of a person who wants to be at the forefront,” he said, resuming an expression often used by former Prime Minister and President of the Republic Cavaco Silva.

Montenegro concluded its intervention with a call for political participation in the next European elections, recalling that Portugal will have two tools to combat abstentions in this vote: mobile voting on election day, June 9, anywhere in the country (without registration, just with an identification document personality) and early voting the week before, which both the Prime Minister and the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, had already said they would use.

“Increasingly, many decisions are starting to be taken at the European level and we cannot see them as decisions that come from Europe to Portugal, these are decisions that we also make, it is very important that everyone contributes to the choice of our European level. deputies,” defended.