These optimistic positions about the country's coming years were conveyed by António Costa at the end of a session on the reprogramming of the PRR at the Centro Cultural de Belém, in Lisbon.

On Friday, the European Commission approved the review of Portugal's PRR, which now amounts to 22.2 billion euros, a change that took into account high inflation and the impact of the war in Ukraine.

“Our economy will accelerate its change with the PRR. We are making an investment that does not increase GDP today or in 2025. We are talking about investments that will add eight billion euros in turnover to the Portuguese economy from 2026 onwards”, he maintained.

He added that the transformative effect of the PRR will involve the creation of 18 thousand jobs, of which “11 thousand are highly qualified”.

“This change will allow the country to change structurally”, he added, before expressing optimism regarding the country’s ability to execute the approximately 22 billion euros of PRR in time.

Working under pressure

At this point, António Costa even argued that, in the specific Portuguese case, “fortunately the clock doesn’t stop”. He then advocated the thesis according to which the country works better under pressure when it has challenges ahead.

“If you look closely, the country is always exceptional in exceptional moments. 25 years ago there was a lot of anguish about Expo 98, but it was a huge success; we had enormous anguish about what was going to happen at Euro 2004 football, whether there was a lot of violence, but there was no violence at all and everything was peaceful; Even this year, everyone was anxious about World Youth Day, how they would survive this invasion of young people, but it was another great success,” he declared.

In other words, in conclusion, according to the Prime Minister, the Portuguese “are exceptional in exceptional moments”.

“Our greatest difficulty is to be exceptional in our day-to-day normality – and fortunately the PRR imposes this exceptionality on us, because this is the condition in which we function best”, he reinforced.