The general secretary of the Socialist Party has accused the government of overseeing the largest destruction of jobs for years and says he considers it "very serious" that the Prime Minister does not know, or does not care that he is misleading the public with his unemployment figures.
"In recent years we have lived through the greatest destruction of jobs seen for ages with 320,000 jobs lost," said António Costa.
Costa, who was speaking to journalists this weekend during a visit to Odemira, accused the Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho of deceit, "the 160,000 jobs created recently have been in employment schemes, i.e they are subsidised jobs which have a statistical impact but have had little impact on the effective creation of jobs."
Costa noted that 90% of these employment contracts only 20% have been converted into real jobs.
According to Costa, "the way the Prime Minister systematically plays with the numbers and deceives people clearly shows a lack of confidence."
"And that's why we have not been able to mobilise the country, because no one mobilises a country by cheating people, you mobilise a country by speaking the truth," he said, arguing that "it is essential to restore confidence and the first step to restore confidence is to have a political debate about the data and about the truth."
According to António Costa, "people know very well what has happened in Portugal in the last four years, they well know how this government boasted and bragged about going above and beyond the obligations imposed by the Troika."
"What people well know is that the situation we live in today results not only from the Troika’s austerity policy but by the exaggeration of this policy by this government."
"It is unfortunate that the government has not learned from its mistakes and that it now is proposing more of the same to the public - keep the cuts, increase taxes and impose new cuts in pensions of more than €600 million."
"What people tell us today, people we listen to on the street, is the following: we need to change this policy and we need to restore confidence in the country."
Comments
It is rich any of Portugal's leadership sounding off about missing or misleading figures when a core part of the scam Portugal has played on the EU - exactly as Greece - specifically depends on not having an effective system in place to calculate the figures. Which the leadership will be fully aware of.
Over the last few years Portugal has repeatedly been requested by the Troika to supply relevant and accurate figures to confirm what it has been telling Brussels since joining the EU and equally often you can read in any Troika follow up report that, in the absence of these figures - they will guess-estimate.
Only this year did we discover that Portugal has no defined law against racism. And that consequently the Portuguese body coordinating racism figures has, for example, nothing on the number or type of crimes against foreigners by the Portuguese Police.
Like Greece, Portugal has been warned to get 'serious' about its figures. Let us hope one day, in our lifetimes, it will.