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Portugal’s bid to attract foreign money backfires as rental market goes ‘crazy’
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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First, I disagree that a government which constantly harps about doing what's good for business, unconditionally I might add (not "good for business which are good for people", just good for any businesses), cuts down on Education and Healthcare citing lack of money whilst refusing to, for example, enforce the legislation on the taxing some asset (dams) sales by the private energy company of the country (which, by the way, was public, sold for a song and is riddled with politicians from the 2 main parties) and which has just saved a private airline with €3 billion of taxpayer's money with the full intention of privatising it next year, is left of center.
Whatever leftwingery they had back in the 80s has long left the stage and policywise they're now doing and defending what the mainstream rightwing party used to: less taxing of companies, less public spending and privatisations, only they added elements like the whole saving of private companies with public money to sell them back to the private (almost certainly for less than the public money put in them) ASAP or the selective closing of eyes to tax evasion (not avoidance, evasion: the illegal kind) as long as it was done by well connected companies, which in the old days not even the mainstream Right did.
Both parties of the power duopoly in Portugal do the same because as individuals their members and leadership are the same kind of people, as plenty of court cases have demonstrated and in fact, the supposed "leftwing" one seems to be the worst one, at least at government levels (though for the other one, all you have to remember is how in Germany a German Company was convicted for corrupting the Portuguese Government for a submarine sale, whilst in Portugal ... *crickets*).
We are in the shithole we are because the people in the 2 parties which have had a near duopoly of power in the country since 74 have massivelly gained from the actions that put us in this, all the while blaming the "other side" as if de facto their policies differed when it came to manage the country for their own personal upside maximization and screw the rest.
They play politics like a one-two play in football, passing the ball back and forth whilst advancing to score against everybody else, members of the same team, and only those who look at nothing else but the ball go around blaming one side, then the other, then the first side, then the other and so on.
To address your points. 1 - They did not cut down on Education and Healthcare. The budgets for healthcare have consistently increased during their legislatures. 2 - They did not save a private airline. TAP had 50% ownership from the State before being rescued. It had private management, but the state had as much ownership as private stockholders and workers together. Also, TAP was nationalized so now it is 100% from the state. Should they privatize it or not? That's a discussion for other pints. 3 - As for the dams sales, the Secretary of State ordered the Tributary Authority to collect the money from those sales.
Are they as left wing as they should be? No they're not. But they are not the worst one by far. If you don't remember or were old enough the last PSD/CDS government or Cavaco's governments I can assure they were a lot worse. And there are stark differences between how the governments of each party have acted with different leaders. Costa's PS is starkly different (and less corrupt) than Sócrates's PS. It doesn't mean that there aren't scandals (there are), but the scale of corruption is much smaller. Compared with the last PSD/CDS government which privatized the CTT, the freight train portion of CP (CP carga), gave a monopoly to Vinci in the management of airports in Portugal, wanted to privatize the public transport of Lisbon, and TAP among many other issues the difference is stark. You should probably try to distinguish the shades of gray instead of seeing dark everywhere.
You seem to have forgotten to discount Inflation from that budget "increase" - a common oversight for people not from Finance or Economics leveraged by neoliberal politicians, again and again to swindle them. I lived in the UK for a decade and there was no trick more beloved by the hard-right Tory politicians there than to claim "budget" increases which were actually falls in real terms and when I came back to Portugal I found out the only thing the portuguese politicians had copied from there while I was out was the marketing-speak filled with half-truths and hypocrisy.
A company controlled by the private is private. Don't get me started on the massive conflict of interest and incredible financial stupidity of the State having a shareholding in a private company which it does not control - you buy minority shares for investment purposes and you sell them if the company is going down the drain, not this shit of being the one holding 100% of the losses. Mind you, you could in all fairness blame the last ones for it. However the already assertivelly voiced (with a timeframe and everything) want to privatise of the company - which you dismissed as a "different discussion" - is exactly the pure neoliberal rightwing action incompatible with being leftwing for a governing party which, not a year ago, was harping all about the company being of "national interest" to justify putting half-an-Education-budget worth of money into it - either TAP is to serve the nation's "interests" (i.e. it serves a broader strategy for the good of Portugal), in which case it stays in 100% national ownership and operates routes which are strategically important but might loose money (i.e. it's not managed for profit but for national objectives, same as the NHS and Education) or it's fully private in which case it's subject to the full "constructive destruction" element of the Free Market, no State shares to be used as excuse for yet-another-bailout in a few years' time and if it goes bankrupt, well, if the market need is there some other company will take its place.
Continuing to willfully privatise large state companies, ASAP even, even if it's fewer companies they're privatising that the pure Rightwing party did, is not being Leftwing, it's being Rightwing, possibly not even less than the others because these ones have fewer companies they can privatise than the last guys, so privatising less when there is less to privatise doesn't mean less political will to do it (i.e. less of that ideology), it means less opportunity to do so.
I am absolutelly more than old enough to remember not just Cavaco's Government (his second absolute majority was when the wave of corruption in politics in Portugal really started post-Revolution) and even that one did not create the kind of problems that have been created since Socrates, through the last guys (same shit) and which this ones kept on stoking with gusto: we never, ever, EVER had both medical doctors and teachers striking, a housing crisis like this (and in the closest we had to this, houses were way cheaper and public housing building was way more than now), highly educated young people leaving in droves and a massivelly aged population with no prospects of improving, all while interest rates just went up about 3x and people have never been this indebted (having been in Finance - Lehman Brothers, no less - through the 2008 crash, I expect an almighty "kaboom" soon enough as consumers run out of financial margin to scrap up the extra money to service debt which is now way more expensive to service than some months ago: expects lots of distressed realestate sales soon enough).
If crisis really shows the true managerial mettle of somebody, then these guys wouldn't be capable of successfully selling water in the desert. Mind you, I don't think there is a single political party in Portugal lead by people with any managerial competence at all, probably the result of how the whole place operates on cronyism (hence one of the lowest levels of productivity in Europe) and has a really bad management culture overall.
You need to have the kind of selective blindless only those who are "fans" of a team in politics in the same spirit they're fans of a football team are capable of, to think it's just the one buttcheek (the one you're not a fan of) of the same shitty arse which is the cronyism and corruption-riddled duopolly of power in Portugal to blame for were we are now.
I mean, to try and compare Cavaco's curruption against Socrate's (and the current guys: after all, in Portugal it always takes at least a decade for the full extent of the rot in government to come out, so the stuff already out just this year is a pretty good indication of the gigantic extent of the whole thing, which will eventually come to light as time goes by) is like measuring turds to see which one is longest: surely you must realise they're both pure shit?!