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As has been the case since the second year of the presidential term, in 2017, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa addressed a Christmas message to Portuguese through the pages of the “Jornal de Notícias”. This year, the head of state makes a historical review of the difficulties that the country has gone through at other times to leave some warnings about what still awaits us, in the complex context of a pandemic that forced us to be far from those who the more we love. Appealing to the resilience of citizens and the need to accelerate the pace of the path that we have been tracing.
Read the full message:
A pandemic Christmas
Portugal knew, in the lives of the least young, Christmas at war. Those over 90 remember it, the end of their childhood or the beginning of adolescence. A war on the outside, but with limitations on the inside, for example in the supply of certain goods or even a beginning in the early 1940s. Above all, he is remembered by those who are now over 60 years old, particularly those who came from Africa after 1974 and those who fought in Angola, Guinea and Mozambique. These memories remain impressive, even for those who only followed those times through censored television and messages from our army during Christmas.
Portugal lived, in the lives of the very young and the very young, Christmas in financial and economic crisis and, consequently, socially. It reminds you of less young and younger of several generations. Starting from what seemed to be an economic growth but that would translate into the emigration of one million Portuguese, between the early 60s and 1974, and continuing in the crises of the 70s, 80s and second decade of the 21st century, which were diverse, but all determinants of international interventions.
At different times, Portugal has known Christmas with a very great poverty, or with the permanence of incompressible structural poverty, that is, a very difficult reduction, or with this poverty aggravated by the economic and financial crises. Portugal knew Christmases with epidemic outbreaks before Democracy and already in Democracy, but of limited duration, in addition to this Christmas.
Christmas 2020 is a substantially new reality. It is spent in a pandemic. The pandemic hit us ten months ago. Despite the hope of receiving vaccinations, he is about to stick around for weeks and months, with no one knowing or predicting how many. With the health pandemic, an economic and social pandemic has emerged, in addition to the fundamental problems of our economy and our society. The increase in poverty and inequality was an immediate effect of the two pandemics. In a word, Christmas 2020 is lived with two simultaneous pandemics and with a dramatic experience of aggravated social gaps. And this combination of crisis makes this Christmas unprecedented ground.
On the psychological consequences of pandemics. Change social behaviors. Changing community relationships. In the absence of comparative standards to measure the scope and depth of what has changed, what has changed, what will remain, what will go away as the pandemic subsides and as economic recovery, recreation and correction. inequalities become visible.
Of course, the most urgent thing is to look at Christmas 2020 with a shorter-term vision, to avoid creating objective conditions for a negative or very negative start in 2021. And all that we can do to protect more weeks and months. close, it should be done. But there is and must be another look at Christmas 2020. Which implies a medium-term vision. The broad consensus to create the conditions for a better start in 2021, in terms of the health pandemic, must be extended to what will still be months of the outbreak and its prevention, while vaccination progresses.
How to spread concern about the economic and social pandemic. Which will dominate in 2021, especially when the health pandemic is fading. Broad consensus, stability, strengthening of social cohesion, existence of trustworthy references. This is what Christmas 2020 demands of all Portuguese, continues to demand now and will continue to demand for some time.
Since March, we have shown that we can meet this requirement. In these days, we will not lose ourselves between the joy responsible for the reunion and the rediscovery of the value of hope in resistance to difficulties. We have already traveled so much together and with unwavering determination that nothing can lead us to lay down and lose what we have achieved.
With hesitations, discontinuities, subtleties. All of them expendable and even counterproductive. The challenge is too important and the time too pressing, too, to behave in any other way than to continue doing and accelerate what, along the same lines, must be done.
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa
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