At the end of a lunch, in Lisbon, in what is the only campaign action of the day, João Cotrim de Figueiredo said that Europe has to solve the issue of Ukraine, the change of energy sources and the adaptation of society to technologies, "all very important, complex and expensive challenges".

Therefore, if Europe wants to have a chance of successfully facing these challenges, it has to have the capacity to generate financial resources.

"It is economic growth that generates opportunities so that we can effectively pay Europeans increasingly better and, immediately, our young people who are entering the job market", he understood.

Economic growth gives people the opportunity to have better salaries and better living conditions, he added.

According to the liberal candidate, Europe is "close to being able to have serious difficulties in giving due compensation to Europeans who want to stay in Europe".

Stressing that economic growth is not an economic problem, but rather a political one, João Cotrim de Figueiredo considered that it is easy to grow again with a more integrated vision and the removal of obstacles.

"Europe has already grown strongly and grew strongly at a time when it was much more integrated or began to be more integrated than it had been in the past. The fact of integrating markets, procedures, ways of doing things and removing obstacles causes growth", he said.

In his opinion, it is "relatively easy to resume this path of growth" and overcome the delay that today "is evident" in terms of innovation, attracting talent and investment.

"Our concern in this whole campaign has been to make Europe that place it once was again, not out of nostalgia, but almost out of futurism", he stressed.

João Cotrim de Figueiredo highlighted that the goal is that in the future someone can say that Europe is "a space of peace, freedom and prosperity".

And one of the measures, in his view, involves deepening the single market again, which today has "more obstacles to the circulation of some goods" than it had 40 years ago.

"There are more difficulties, more rules, more bureaucracy and more technical standards to comply with, and all of this has prevented more robust economic growth", he said.

The single market can no longer be just the market for the circulation of people, goods, services and capital, but also the free circulation of knowledge.

According to the top candidate, it is necessary to give the single market a central role in European policies again.

Read Also: Tânger says that the peace solution will be "what Ukraine wants" (Portuguese version)