"The Portuguese prime-minister informed last evening that he had given up the main commitment he had assumed before the Portuguese people: to be in opposition to an intervention of the EU and the IMF", said last night Francisco Louçã, leader of Bloco de Esquerda.

Louçã mentioned that the government gave up its commitment after having received a command from the main Banks in Portugal, who had decided to strangle the financial support to the state, and pointed out again that if Portugal is in such a difficult situation this is not due to the fact that the Portuguese Parliament decided not to approve the new Stability and Growth Programme, the fourth presented in less than 12 months.

It has been basically one year since FMI started to “help” the Greek socialist government from Papandreu. On the 23^rd April 2010, Mr. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), issued the following statement today on Greece: “We have received Greece’s request for a Stand-By Arrangement. We have been working closely with the Greek authorities for some weeks on technical assistance, and have had a mission on the ground in Athens for a few days working with the authorities and the European Union. We are prepared to move expeditiously on this request.” But the fallout of all these months is translated in everything except help: freezing of all salaries in the public sector until 2014, reduction or elimination of subsidies, increase of social contributions, increase of retirement age in public and private sectors to 65 years, retirement age starts to be adjusted depending of statistics on average life expectancy from 2020 on, increase of VTA in 10 per cent per rank, and so on and so on. Basically more unemployment, more precariousness, more poverty to those who are not responsible for the crisis.

The chairman of Bloco de Esquerda's political commission, Francisco Louçã, recalled that "in three disastrous economic decisions, which a left wing finance minister would never accept, the government managed to spend three times what is today's current budget": one billion Euros buying useless submarines to a German company, one billion Euros that the Portuguese Telecom did not pay in taxes and 2 billion for the bailout of the Bank BPN whose CEO has been arrested by illegal speculative mismanagement.

Francisco Louçã affirmed that the Government has not been rigorous and underlined that Portugal has lived a lost decade (governments Barroso and Sócrates), during which the sovereign debt has doubled, sinking Portugal in the third recession in a decade, receding to the economic level of 2002.

Francisco Louçã announced that "the Bloco will present a plan to deal with the debt, to mobilise our capacities, to protect the economy, so that we can concentrate on what is essential".