"It is time to once again say, as we said some 20 years ago, that education has once again to be a passion of this country and it is necessary to invest in our education," Costa told his audience before advocating school dropout rates be a “grand cause” of the next parliament.


“Contrary to what this government thinks, school does not serve to select the excellent and exclude the others, school serves to include others,” said the Socialist Secretary General before calling for pre-primary school to be extended to the over-3s as “the earlier children begin the school education, the greater the guarantee of higher levels of success.”


The Costa speech also called for improvements to the content of education and in particular emphasising artistic learning deemed "fundamental" to developing creativity whilst also extending to other campaign themes including employment and budget cuts.


As regards the former, Costa said that out of all of the young persons he had spoken to, only two had not been able to find work in Portugal but that all the others had been driven to emigrate due to “internship after internship, freelance outsourcing after freelance outsourcing, short term contract after short term contract” before calling on the authorities to clamp down on abusive labour market practices.


In addition to indirect criticism of Passos Coelho, Costa added that despite much government fanfare over the departure of the troika, when that did happen “everything remained the same” as the government was “the true troika.”