2
Apr
2025
Watch
Topical debate (Rule 169) - Social Europe: making life affordable, protecting jobs, wages and health for all
Mr President, better jobs, better wages and pensions, access to housing, health, education, better social protection, a better distribution of wealth, eradication of poverty. Here are the priorities of the people, but they are not the priorities of the European Union. The petition we promote in Portugal for the increase of wages and pensions shows this demand of the people in the more than 100,000 signatures demanding a better life. But when Social Europe is proclaimed here, it does not correspond to the choices made by the European Union. In fact, some of the Members who are now talking about social cohesion and a social Europe in this debate have just rejected proposals that went precisely in this direction, embedded in the guidelines for the European Union's budget for 2026. That is what needs to be reversed urgently. We need the European Union to support, in fact, better policies to respond to the economic and social problems of peoples, guarantees of development with the focus on economic, social and territorial cohesion that must guide and guide political choices.