Paulo Raimundo Closes the Fiftieth Festa do Avante by Warning the Socialists That Passing the Budget Would Free Chega

The fiftieth Festa do Avante! closed on Sunday evening at the Quinta da Atalaia in Amora, and Paulo Raimundo spent more than half an hour of it addressing a party that was not there.

The PCP's general secretary told the crowd that if the Socialists let the 2027 State Budget through, they will have confirmed "their complicity with right-wing policy" and handed the PSD and CDS government, along with Chega and the Iniciativa Liberal, "more room to raise the attack". The formulation matters more than the insult. Raimundo's argument is that a Socialist abstention does not merely permit a budget; it removes the need for Chega to do the permitting, and so releases Chega to keep campaigning against the government it would otherwise have had to prop up.

"If the PS does it, it will also have to take responsibility for the dismantling of the National Health Service, the attack on the public school, property speculation, the attack on wages, on pensions and on Social Security, for the privatisations, for rising prices," he said. Doing so, he added, gives Chega "more room to go on deceiving the people".

The motion he did not mention

Chega's censure motion, which parliament debates and votes on Tuesday, went unmentioned in the closing speech. Raimundo had refused on Saturday to condition his party's own occasion "to other people's agenda". He did address the underlying material obliquely, saying the country's problems are not the fruit of "incompetence, of being too clever by half, or of cases involving ministers whose explanations leave a great deal to be desired". The problem, he said, "is the government's policy, a policy of disaster, which deserves censure", and those who support it are censurable too: Chega, the PS and the IL, who "one after another, or together, give it a hand, give it an arm, give it the whole body".

Portugal is on its thirty-seventh censure motion since democracy returned, and only one has ever passed. The arithmetic on Tuesday is not in doubt. The budget arithmetic in October is.

Prices, the Constitution and Social Security

The rest of the speech was a list of demands aimed at the cost of living: regulation of food, energy and fuel prices, a gas bottle fixed at 20 euros, VAT cut to 6 percent on energy and telecommunications, and more public transport supply on the way to making it free. Raimundo said the prime minister talks about rising incomes but "his propaganda collides with the reality of daily life, in which wages and pensions are eaten by the brutal increase in the cost of living". The timing is convenient for him: pump prices are set to reach an all-time high this week.

He also accused the government of preparing an "assault on Social Security" and said only a strong signal of rejection from workers would stop it, a theme that has run through the Socialists' own stated conditions for the budget. And in the year that marks fifty years since the Constitution was approved, he accused the right of wanting, "at capital's bidding, to reconfigure, even to tear up" the fundamental law.

The festival itself he called a singular moment that has marked successive generations. The next one is booked: 3, 4 and 5 September 2027, at the Atalaia.

What this means for expats

• The vote that matters is October, not Tuesday: the censure motion will fail; the 2027 budget, which sets IRS bands, pension updates and health spending, is the decision with consequences for households.
• The PCP is not the swing vote: the budget passes or fails on what the Socialists do, which is why the speech was aimed at them rather than at the government.
• Fuel and energy pricing is now a budget issue: the calls for a 6 percent VAT rate on energy and a capped gas bottle will resurface as budget amendments in November.
• Social Security is the live structural argument: both the government's critics and recent changes to the pension formula point at the same file, and any reform would affect anyone accruing Portuguese contributions.
• Diary note: the government must deliver the 2027 budget to parliament by 10 October, which starts a six-week negotiation in public.