The President of the Republic left a Christmas message in which he calls for a "broad consensus" and for the "strengthening of social cohesion" to face the economic and social pandemic that will dominate 2021, when the pandemic "fade out".
In the Christmas message, published by Jornal de Notícias, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa talks about the challenges that the country has been experiencing and those that it has to face in 2021, stating "there is and must be another look at Christmas 2020", the which implies a medium-term vision.
«Christmas 2020 is lived with two simultaneous pandemics and with a dramatic experience of aggravated social gaps. And this combination of crises turns this Christmas into a terrain that has never been experienced», he stresses.
In his view, "the most urgent thing is to look at Christmas 2020 with a shorter-term vision – to prevent it from creating objective conditions for a negative or very negative start to 2021".
“Everything we can do to protect the coming weeks and months must be done”, he defends.
For the head of state, "the broad consensus to create conditions for a better start to 2021, in terms of a health pandemic, should extend to what will still be months of an outbreak and its prevention, while vaccination progresses."
It should also extend to “concern for the economic and social pandemic that will dominate 2021, especially when the health pandemic fades away”.
«Expanded consensus, stability, reinforcement of social cohesion, existence of references of trust. This is what Christmas 2020 demands of all of us, Portuguese, continues to demand now and will continue to demand for some time to come», he stresses in the message.
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa recalls that, since March, the country has shown itself to be able to meet this demand: "we will not let up, in these days, between the responsible joy of the reunion and the rediscovery of the value of hope in resisting difficulties."
“We have already traveled so much path together and with unshakeable determination that nothing can make us lose what has been accomplished”, he stresses.
At the beginning of the message, the head of state begins by recalling difficult historical moments that marked other Christmases.
«Portugal has known, in the lives of the less young, Christmases at war. Those over 90 years old, at the end of their childhood or beginning of adolescence, remind him. A war abroad, but with constraints inside, for example regarding the supply of certain goods or even some upheaval in the early forties».
It also recalls the «Christmas in financial and economic and, consequently, social crisis» experienced by the «less young and youngest»» recalling the emigration of «one million Portuguese, between the beginning of the 60s and 1974, and to continue in the crises in the 70's, 80's and second decade of the XNUMXst century, different from each other, but all determining international interventions».
Alluding to Christmas 2020, he says that “it is a substantially new reality: it is a pandemic. The pandemic hit us ten months ago. Despite the hope in the vaccines, she is about to stay for weeks and months, nobody knowing or being able to predict how many».
The President also alerts to the "psychological consequences of pandemics, in the change of social behaviors, in the alteration of community relations".
"In the absence of comparative standards to measure the scope and depth of what has changed, what has changed, what will remain, what will leave as the pandemic attenuates and economic recovery and recreation and correction of inequalities become visible», he stresses.
But, he points out, "with hesitations, discontinuities, quivering, all of which are dispensable and even counterproductive, the challenge is too important and the time too pressing, too, to accommodate anything other than continuing the feat and accelerating what, in the same line, it has to be done».
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