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In the Christmas message, disseminated through the Jornal de Notícias, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa talks about the challenges the country is experiencing and those it has to face in 2021, stating that “there is and should 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 crossroads of crisis turns this Christmas into unprecedented terrain ”, he underlines.
In his opinion, “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.”
“Everything we can do to protect ourselves from the next few weeks and months must be done,” he defends.
For the head of state, “the broad consensus to create the conditions for a better start to 2021, regarding the health pandemic, must be extended to what will be months of an outbreak and its prevention, while vaccination advances.”
It should also be extended “to concern about the economic and social pandemic that will dominate in 2021, especially when the health pandemic is fading.”
“Broad consensus, stability, reinforcement of social cohesion, existence of reliable references. This is what Christmas 2020 demands of all the Portuguese, it continues to demand now and it will continue to demand for some time, ”he underlines in the message.
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa recalls that, since March, the country has shown itself up to this requirement: “These days, we will not fade away amid 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 an unshakable determination, that nothing can make us lie down to lose what we have achieved,” he emphasizes.
At the beginning of the message, the head of state begins by recalling difficult historical moments that marked other Christmases.
Portugal knew, in the lives of the least young, Christmas at war. Those over 90 remember it, the end of their childhood or early adolescence. A war abroad, but with limitations here, for example supply of certain goods or even a start in the early 1940s. ”
He also recalls the “Christmas in the financial and economic crisis and, consequently, social crisis” experienced by the “less young and the youngest”, recalling the emigration of “a million Portuguese, between the early 1960s and 1974, and continuing in Crises of the 70s, 80s and the second decade of the XXI century, different from each other, but all determinants of international interventions ”.
Referring to Christmas 2020, he affirms that “it is a substantially new reality”: “It is a pandemic. The pandemic hit us ten months ago. Despite the hope of vaccines, it is to stay weeks and months without anyone knowing or can predict how many. ”
The president also warns about the “psychological consequences of pandemics, in the change of social behaviors, in the change 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 go away as the pandemic subsides and such as economic recovery and recreation and the correction of inequalities it becomes visible, ”he says.
But, he points out, “with hesitations, discontinuities, fights, 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 the feat and accelerate what, in the same sense . line, you have to. ”
