"Some tell us now, having come out of the closet after 50 years, that the revolution was unnecessary and an exaggeration, that after all the whip always educates, the dungeon moralizes and the blue pencil illustrates. The mourners of Salazarism are not dangerous because of their nostalgia for that past: no empire will be rebuilt, Tarrafal has closed forever and Aljube and Peniche are now museums that must be visited", defended Mariana Mortágua, in the solemn session commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of April 25, in the Assembly of the Republic.

The Bloco MP warned that "the nostalgic are dangerous because they blame democracy and the Constitution for the poverty that persisted, for the bitterness of unfulfilled promises and for the corruption that is rampant in privatizations, in revolving doors, in the financing of the oligarchy's own parties", warning that "they live for lies".

In her first speech in a solemn session of the Carnation Revolution as coordinator of the Left Bloc, Mortágua recalled Salazar's dictatorship and a country that "bowed to sadness, forced emigration, the cursed war and the secondary role of women".

"Our country was only saved by the revolution of April 25", she stressed, refusing that this day be "a consolation for a time that is over".

"What I bring here, on behalf of the Left Bloc, in an embrace with all democrats, is a warning about the present for a manifesto for the future. What haunts us is called capitalism", she said.

For the coordinator of the Left Bloc, capitalism "is the power that transforms technologies into threats, that sacrifices immigrants to benefit those who exploit their illegal status, that destroys tomorrow's planet in the name of today's dividends".

"It is capitalism that makes the house a financial asset and an unattainable place, that attacks democracy with hate speech, that calls social injustice merit, that imposes on us the individualistic caricature of ourselves and reduces us to the condition of consumer or taxpayer, thus forbidding us to imagine the collective future, because that belongs to the market", she listed.

Mortágua stressed that "freedom is also and only fully so in the definition of our common goals" and that "our freedom begins where the freedom of others begins".

"That's what today is all about. Not a consolation, but the inspiration for an open time. We dare to imagine that future", she said.

The Bloco coordinator defended that the future "is to guarantee decent work", "to free creativity and have time to live".

"Therefore, against the exploitation that is modernizing but not abating, we affirm the right to wages and rest. The future is to decide the social objectives of the common effort, and therefore, against the invisible hand that tears apart what belongs to everyone, we affirm ecological planning", she defended.

Mortágua also defended that "to claim the future is, therefore, to build progress in favor of the community and to distribute all its fruits".

"Against fear and existential grudges, we affirm the certainty that the whole world fits here, we all have the right to live in equal conditions and to have what we need for a good life. A good life, yes, with free time, respect for each one, collective purposes, common dreams, the decolonized imagination: in other words, everything that brings us closer to freedom", she stressed.

Also Read: PS and Left Bloc make a common assessment of the dangers of a constitutional revision (Portuguese version)