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Every year, the stands are set up and the stage is dismantled, the balance is made in a festive way: one more year of the “Avante!” Party, Another success, thousands and thousands more enter Quinta da Atalaia to help demonstrate the PCP strength. But how many thousands? In fact, no one knows how many people go to the party, a mixture of a rally, a political event and a music festival, which marks the communist rentrée. The data is opaque and the party does not reveal the numbers of the public in “Avante!”: It did not answer the questions sent by Expresso and refuses, year after year, to explain to the Entity of Accounts and Political Financing (ECFP) how many tickets it sold. It is not the only “transparency” problem pointed out to the PCP: every year the Entity finds weaknesses and irregularities in the income and expenses of the rentrée.
The opacity of the figures allowed the PCP, in recent weeks -during the fight with the General Directorate of Health- to give the idea that it would make a very considerable reduction in the population, by cutting a third of the maximum licensed capacity, according to figures that were made public, from 100 thousand to 33 thousand people simultaneously in Quinta da Atalaia. However, according to Expresso accounts based on data provided by the PCP to the ECFP, this brutal capacity cut would not decisively limit the number of visitors. The more conservative accounts, based on the revenue the party recorded from the sale of permanent tickets (EP) in the 2017 report (the latest available on the ECFP website), reveal that the annual number of visitors will be far less. under 100 thousand. and closer to 33 thousand.
