It’s the soundbite being promoted today: 2019’s State Budget, finally approved yesterday, will ensure that Portugal clears its bailout debt with the IMF.
Says the tabloid press, it’s a way of camouflaging the ‘failures’ and trying to muffle all the criticism.
The principle ‘failures’ were the government’s own proposal for a Civil Protection tax, and its support of making the bullfighting industry pay IVA at 13%.
The latter was always going to be dodgy territory, for endless reasons (click here) - and animal rights campaigners are suitably ‘enraged’ that bullfights will continue to be considered ‘cultural events’ and so pay the lowest (6%) IVA going.
As for the rest, continued support from left-wing allies has been assured with the ceding to various proposals that add another 100 million euros to the final tally.
Regarding the clearing of Portugal’s debt to the IMF, reports stress this is not an end by any means to the country’s bailout bill.
The IMF’s slice was ‘only’ 26.3 billion euros - and right now, the final tranche owing is down to 4.7 billion. This still leaves Portugal with 51.6 billion in debts to Brussels and the European Central Bank.
Says the forever-fuming CDS, Portugal is “worse off now than in the times of the troika”. Leader Assunção Cristas claims to have toured the country and seen first-hand that families and businesses are being “suffocated by taxes”, while ‘nothing is being done to face-up to structural problems of demographics and desertification of the interior’.
PSD centre-right opponents criticise the government for being ‘much more concerned with its day to day survival than with the true interests of the country’.
The ‘geringonça’ alliance that maintains Socialist in power “has had better days and will have increasingly worsening ones”, blasted deputy leader Adão Silva.
But after all the ire and bluster, 2019’s State Budget has been approved, and according to its PS champions will ensure “more life”, economic stability and further international credibility.
President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa is now expected to rubber stamp the document ‘some time before Christmas’.
What is certain, is that Portugal’s central trades union, the UGT, considers measures fall short of guaranteeing workers “the expectations created by the government”. In that regard, syndicates across the board are locked in various battles, the outcomes of which are still by no means certain.
And one rather unsettling point has been the approval of new childhood vaccinations. See our separate story in which pediatrician Ana Jorge says MPs should not be powering the introduction of new vaccines without the approval of the country's board of health.
Jorge suggests the pharmaceutical industry has been given too much rein.
By NATASHA DONN natasha.donn@algarveresident.com
Article by kind permission of The Portugal Resident
