Costa invites young people to return to Portugal

António Costa during a trip to Vila Real in the context of the elections for mayors that will take place next month. To invite the young people to return to Portugal emphasizing that they "are welcome" and that they will have "more support" if they return to the land in Portugal.

Costa invites young people to return to Portugal

"Now that we are turning the page on the pandemic, now that we have started to move towards normalcy and thanks to vaccination, the pandemic seems to be under control and now that the global circulation is starting to pick up again, it is time to tell the young people who have left to come back because they are welcome," said the Prime Minister.

António Costa also added that if young people "return to the interior regions, they will have more support", as part of the programa RegressarThis is the area where "the demographic effort is most needed".

"We will expand, deepen and improve the programa Regressar by supporting all those who had to leave, especially in recent years, and now want to return," he stressed.

In his speech in the district's capital, Costa reinforced the message he repeated during this tour of the country's interiorThe meeting, which began in Bragança and ended on Sunday in Guarda, on the demographic challenge and the role of this territory in the new peninsular centralized.

"If this demographic challenge is a general challenge for the whole country, it is obviously more intense in low-density areas and in the territories of the interior and border regions and, therefore, the effort here must be a greater effort and this effort implies, first of all, that we achieve this objective that we defined in 2015 and which is to transform the border regions into new centralities in the Iberian space," he stressed.

In this sense, he recalled that, for the first time, after four decades of joint participation in the European Union, Portugal and Spain "will present in Brussels a joint program for the development of the entire border region" between the two countries.

António Costa also stated that it is necessary to continue to attract businesses to the interior, "creating the conditions to make the CRI more attractive in these regions, to continue the effort to reduce tolls in these territories" and stressed that the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR) "provides exclusively to the interior regions a significant investment in the areas of business location."

Finally, he also recalled that about 3,000 "high-skilled" jobs have been created, out of the 3,800 initially planned in the program, and stressed that this plan is reinforced to create another 20,000 high-skilled jobs in the interior by 2023.