100 YEARS SERVING PEOPLE AND COUNTRY, FOR DEMOCRACY AND SOCIALISM
The Portuguese Communist Party was founded on 6 March 1921. Its creation responded to a historical need of the Portuguese working class.
Having existed for a mere five years, the PCP was confronted with the coup d’état, made illegal and, for 48th years, was the target of the brutal repression of the Fascist regime.
It was in difficult clandestine conditions that the PCPcommitted to the inseparable aims of toppling the Fascist dictatorship and establishing political democracy, and the revolutionary transformation of the economic, social and cultural structures and defence of Portuguese sovereignty and independence, conditions in their own right for the establishment and consolidation of the democratic regime. Along with many other democrats, the PCP made a decisive contribution to the fight for freedom and democracy.
The PCP, which paid a high price for opting for antifascist resistance – communists made up the majority of the resistance who paid with their lives, with torture or the harshest prison sentences for their courageous decision to fight for freedom – played a decisive role in building antifascist unity and in the organisation of the workers’ struggle. Its actions were decisive in all the great battles waged against the Fascist dictatorship – against repression, for freedom and democracy, against high living costs and hunger, for workers’ rights, to achieve eight-hour working days in the fields of the south, for the end of colonial war and the independence of the peoples of the ex-colonies, against Nazi-Fascism and war.
These were the battles waged over the decades leading up to the defeat of Fascism in the military and popular uprising of 25 April and the profound democratic transformations of that April Revolution
– from agrarian reform to nationalisation, from workers’ control to local democratic power – which would be consecrated in the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic approved on 2 April 1976.
25 April, a vastly significant and fundamental point in the history of Portugal, was led by the people. A key player in the Revolution, the PCP continues its activity to assert and defend the values of the April Revolution as traits of emancipation and progress that are indissociable from the Portugal of the future.
The history and struggle of the PCP is merged with that of the workers and the Portuguese people. Behind every achievement of rights, behind each step in improving living conditions, behind each civilisational advance, we can find the contribution and often decisive role of the PCP.
Today, the PCP continues to intervene to find answers to the most urgent and meaningful demands and needs of the workers and the people and to national problems. A fight for the sovereign development of the country, for social progress, for peace and cooperation with all peoples, for a patriotic, left-wing alternative, for an advanced democracy, simultaneously political, economical, social and cultural, inseparable from national independence.
The PCP is 100 years old. As stated in its programme An Advanced Democracy – the Values of April in Portugal’s Future, the ‘fight to guarantee the PCP’s programme, through the will of the Portuguese people, is the path of freedom, of democracy, of national independence, of peace and of socialism. It is the path along which lie the best interests of the Portuguese people and the Portuguese nation.’
Portuguese Communist Party
