In a press conference in parliament, Paulo Raimundo was asked about the Government's decision, announced this Sunday by CDS leader Nuno Melo, to create a commission to commemorate the 50th anniversary of November 25, 2025.

"There are some - and I don't mean to say that this is the Government's proposal, it is not - who want to commemorate November 25 not for what it was, but for what they would have liked it to be. And what they would have liked it to be was the end of the democratic regime and, by extension, the end of the PCP", he said.

However, the communist leader continued, November 25 "was neither one thing nor the other, regardless of the will" of some.

"I always like to emphasize that, after November 25, 1975, came a date called April 2, 1976, which enshrined something called the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic, with approved content that has nothing to do with the objectives of those who want to commemorate November 25", he said.

Acknowledging that November 25 is an "important date" - which involved "setbacks from the point of view of the revolutionary process that was underway", and which "went backwards" - Paulo Raimundo stressed that the attempted military operations attributed to the "counter-revolution" of September 28 and March 11 are also important.

"Are we now going to commemorate March 11 and the nationalizations? Are we going to commemorate September 28 as the great attempt at a right-wing coup in the country, a counter-revolutionary one? Are we going to do all that? That is up to each one of us", he said.

The PCP's secretary-general reiterated that November 25 "was not what some of its mentors wanted it to be" and stressed that, in two years' time, the 50th anniversary of the Constitution will be marked, challenging everyone to revisit "what was written, stated, the objectives that each one proclaimed at the time, and then the process that developed".

Paulo Raimundo also stressed that he has "no doubt" that the commemorations of the 50th anniversary of April 25, which are now being marked, will have "a massive, expressive and significant dimension" throughout the country.

"It will be the great response in the affirmation of April, of values, of the project, of what needs to be resumed and not of what was interrupted", he said.

In these statements to journalists, Paulo Raimundo was also asked if the PCP will vote against the Government's proposal on IRS, and he replied that the party will not be able to support this initiative.

It is "wrapped in propaganda, in a mystification and, as we are tired of saying, the Government is doing all this soap opera around the so-called fiscal shock in IRS, but what it has in mind, in a significant way, is IRC and the surcharge", he stressed.

Paulo Raimundo recalled that the party presented, this Monday, a bill that lowers the IRS for the first brackets and increases taxation on capital and wealth, considering that it has the advantage of representing a tax relief "for the vast majority of those who work" and of simultaneously increasing the State's revenue.

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