The Prime Minister and President of the PSD, Luís Montenegro, increased this Saturday, December 6th, the salary targets for the country, now speaking of 1600 euros minimum wage and 3000 euros average, one day after mentioning lower values.
“We don’t want to grow 2% per year. We want to grow 3%, 3.5%, 4%. We want the minimum wage not to reach 1100 [euros]. That is the objective we have for this legislature, but we want more. May it reach 1500 or 1600″, he said at the closing of the X National Congress of Social-Democratic Mayors (ASD), in Porto.
The Prime Minister, who on Friday had suggested taking advantage of the opportunity of a possible change in labor laws to raise the minimum wage to 1500 euros and the average to 2000 or 2500, said this Saturday that he does not want “the average wage to reach 1600 or 1700”, but rather “to reach 2500, 2800 or 3000 euros”.
Also on Friday night, the general secretary of the PS, José Luís Carneiro, accused the prime minister of “throwing a carrot” to the workers when talking about increasing the minimum wage to 1500 euros, in an attempt to empty the content of the general strike.
Both at the entrance and exit of the Nobre Auditorium of the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP), where the congress of social-democratic mayors took place, Luís Montenegro did not want to make statements to journalists.
“We want, effectively, to create wealth that can combat poverty. We want a country that thinks and executes a development project that it can be lasting, that it can be consistent, that it can be robust enough to, increasingly, be exemplary, as it is today, on a European scale”, he stressed in his speech.
The PSD leader also attacked those who “doubt” the Government’s ambition.
“They are the same people who doubted that last year we would achieve our budgetary and economic targets. We exceeded them. They are the same people who doubted it again this year and we will overcome it again”, he assured.
The prime minister also anticipated that “a year from now” his words “will make even more sense”, just as they will in four years, at the end of the legislature and municipal mandates, which both end in September 2029.