The deputy prime minister Paulo Portas compared the current Troika years to the period when Portugal was ruled by Spain from 1580 for 60 years and looks forward to when the country regains its financial sovereignty early next summer.
In parliament today the 2014 budget was discussed against a noisy backdrop of protestors outside the Assembly building in Lisbon. Trade union members and pensioners were protesting at the budget’s implication and called repeatedly for the resignation of the government and for a general election.
The protestors' rejection of the budget was summarised as the measures "continued the offensive and exploitative impoverishing of workers and pensioners, and other sections of the population, in addition to being more of an attack on the social functions of the state, public services and local democracy."
Inside the assembly building, Portas claimed that in June 2014, the month when the Troika should leave town, Portugal will be able to get rid of "the defects of the memorandum" and criticised António José Seguro, head of the opposition, for saying that things could actually get worse.
This was a foolish debate as the character of the immediate post-Troika period depends on the international markets and the appetite for Portuguese government stock.
The budget at least was debated today with António José Seguro accusing the Government of accounting for €700 million of cuts but not revealing where these savings would come from.
"The Government continues to hide over €700 million in cuts. It puts them in the budget but does not explain their origin," said Seguro. This, he suggested, shows a disregard for the Portuguese people, and creates more uncertainty and insecurity about redundancies in the public sector, cuts in social benefits and the closure of more public services."
Seguro, now on a roll, said Passos Coelho had "broken his commitment to the Portuguese people and has implemented a radical agenda which includes the dismantling of the welfare state."
The feisty Greens, for they were there too, said the Government talks of the economy being on the turn was simply "bullshit." Greens MP José Luís Ferreira said that the government talked of a turning point in the economy but this simply is baloney and is based on positive signs that no one sees, no one feels and that no one is experiencing.
The Communist leader Joao Oliveira harshly criticized the sylvian economic outlook that the Government had dreamed up and accused the Pedro Passos Coelho team of being difficulty, stubborn and empty, "For the third year the country is experiencing an economic war, with the Portuguese people subjected by the war effort to crushed rights, the theft of wages and pensions, unemployment, poverty and emigration.”
The Left Bloc’s Luís Fazenda called for the resignation of the Government "urgently, because this is a bad budget worse even than previous ones."
The government will have its way over the budget which is a tough one, and Passos Coelho and his team, whose latest ploy is to focus on the post Troika period so the electorate forgets to look at what is in front of them, will next focus on changes to Portugal’s constitution taking as a refernce document his deputy's 112 page wish list for state reform. The main points in the state reform document, while we are on the topic, are:
- Appointment of a commission to reform income tax and reduce this tax in 2015
- The inclusion of an (ill-defined) "golden rule" in the Constitution to trust the institutions and markets
- Reduce public employee levels and pay them more
- Introduce more part-time work in public administration
- Renewal within public administration with enhanced recruitment of young graduates
- Capping pensions for future state pensioners
- Promotion of ways to merge municipalities
- Allow families to choose the school they want
- Creation of independent schools and opening bidding that allow teachers to become owners and managers of a school
- Creating incentives for creating jobs
- Reduction of the owner state by the sale of state property, the reduction of state rental payments to save income and rationalisation of public services including a survey of unused space
- Creation in 2014 of a Commission of Social Security Reform to develop a proposal for reform and ensure the sustainability of the system
- Open a national debate on what should be the task of the state in the world we live in
- Faster and better access to effective justice
