Critics said it could never happen, but three years on from the formation of Portugal’s ‘geringonça’ (contraption) government, there is every sign that it won’t just reach the end of its four-year term next October but will win the next legislative elections hands-down. For political bystanders, this has been a ‘magical mystery tour’ where positive PR has been the name of the game.
“Turning the page on austerity” has in reality seen very much more of the same.
Only last week, reports on the amount of expenditure frozen under the Socialists in three years topped spending cuts of the previous centre-right administration made over five. The difference? The Socialists have done it with a smile – and constant assurances that the country has never had it so good.
The collective gloom that settled over Portugal during the years of the troika has finally ‘lifted’ and somehow the massive social problems have melted into a compliant media blackout.
Yes, major issues over pay and conditions are currently on the boil with teachers, nurses, firefighters, police, judges, court staff – even stevedores; national roads and bridges, as well as other infrastructures, are ‘at risk’ due to lack of maintenance and investment since well before the financial crisis. But, somehow, the depression that impelled so many thousands to leave the country has lifted and Portugal is looking to 2019 full of hope (with the majority of its recent émigrés now, apparently, returned).
At the PS celebrations for this three-year milestone in Guimarães this week, the woman very much seen as wily prime minister António Costa’s ‘right hand’ managed to produce a document proclaiming 90% of the PS promises to the nation in 2015 “have been fulfilled”.
“2017 and 2018 were the first years of this century in which the Portuguese economy grew more than the average of its European partners” and the “economy continues to recover in the context of exports” (with a 4.6% increase forecast for 2019, and the third best performance in the eurozone since 2015).
The document emerging from the office of 40-year-old ‘superwoman’ Mariana Vieira da Silva describes how investment – also expected to increase by 7% next year – has risen for the last seven trimesters “more than in the eurozone” and “remains as one of the principle engines of growth”.
Since 2015, 340,000 jobs have been created “in the context of improved work conditions” (89% of all new contracts in the last year have been open-ended, i.e. long-term). Salaries (in the public sector) have risen by 3.5% and the minimum wage is due to increase to €600 by 2019 – around €120 more than the limit set during the crisis years.
Pay inequality, too, has been ironed out, so that workers at the lower end of the pay-scale have received the highest percentage increases.
As for inequality within society, Vieira da Silva’s text says that “the rate of material deprivation has fallen by 3.6 percentage points since 2015 and the rate of severe material deprivation has gone from about 9.6% in 2015 to 6.9% in 2017. “
Differences in income between the country’s richest 20% and poorest 20% have “reduced to 2010 levels”, while, according to inequality in income distribution, Portugal has reached “the lowest levels since 1994” (the year when this particular political mechanism was first introduced).
Says the woman who has been described as “Costa’s Xanax” (a tranquilizer for anxiety and panic attacks), this government’s magic on public accounts has been key: “After 2016 and 2017, 2018 and 2019 will again represent the lowest deficits in Portuguese democracy.” Ratings agencies, too, have been adjusting the country’s rating accordingly, “which reflects well the path of decline of Portuguese public debt (estimated to fall to 118.5% of GDP in 2019)”.
The text allowed Costa endless opportunities for jubilant fist-pumping as he proclaimed that Portugal is on the road to “progress and prosperity” through policies that allow “stability, the continued recovery of household incomes, reinforcement of social cohesion, the combat of inequality … promotion of innovation and productivity within companies, consolidation of public services, the valuation of work and human resources and development of culture and knowledge as motors of development”.
Resounding applause put the cherry on PS celebrations, and now it’s back to business, with the 2019 budget getting its final, relatively tortuous reading.
The issues with the budget are that, were the government to agree to all proposals put by left-wing allies, it would be saddled with another €5 billion in expenditure.
Thus, pleasing everyone is not an option, and the fire-and-brimstone-breathing allies all know this. Say pundits, whatever these minority parties say publicly, privately they know they have to go on supporting the government as the alternative would be political suicide.
That said, there is another huge plus point to this government that elbowed its way into power in 2015 (after electoral defeat): the total lack of credible opposition. The leader of the PSD, Rui Rio, has failed dismally to impress the media and, in fact, only recently insulted journalists investigating the ongoing scandal of MPs ‘falsely’ claiming presences in parliament by speaking to them in German.
“Rio is taking the PSD into the swamp,” said a keen political commentator (Manuela Moura Guedes) who knows all about swamps as she herself has only just emerged from one.
But does everyone believe the Socialists’ PR? Not really. Two ‘academics’ interviewed by Público have said, in their ‘expert’ opinions, the only real thing this government will take into the history books is its ability to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.
Never before has the country seen left-wing parties, more traditionally at each other’s throats, so ‘united’.
As for the ‘economic successes’ trumpeted this week, Manuel Villaverde Cabral (former dean of the University of Lisbon) and Rui Bebiano (lecturer in social studies and the director of the Centre of Documentation on April 25) told Público that when all is said and done, they are “very exaggerated”.
By NATASHA DONN natasha.donn@algarveresident.com
Article by kind permission of The Portugal Resident
