“Nobody can stand it, it’s a suffocation”
Hundreds of people took to the streets in eight towns and cities across the country yesterday for the right to housing.
The “Door to Door – Home for All” movement is demanding that the government adopt urgent measures – something hugely unlikely as the current scenario simply has the nation’s politicians exchanging pot-shots at each other, in the run up to March elections.
This is the trouble with almost all Portugal’s current woes: they are being ‘kept on hold’, until a new government takes office, possibly with a revised budget.
Thus, the hardships felt from north to south have no other outlet than demonstration:
“When a worker spends his entire salary to pay for a house, the urgency is self-evident. We all feel the weight of the cost of housing in our lives. We need to demand, to come out onto the streets fighting,” Porta a Porta’s spokesperson André Escoval told yesterday’s television cameras.
In Lisbon, the stage for the protest was Rua Augusta, where those taking part, including children, painted cardboard houses.
In the words of SIC Notícias, these stood as “symbols of the sector’s fragility and the uncertainty experienced by those who pay their mortgage instalments or rent every month”.
Said Escoval: “Nobody can stand another 7% increase in rents, it’s unbearable. Rents today are higher than salaries. Another 7% is a suffocation”. Another of the movement’s imperatives is to “put an end to evictions“, he added.
Saturday’s protests were the culmination of three days of initiatives. Last week the movement went to Brussels. More than 20 tents were set up in front of the European Parliament to protest against the rise in interest rates and house prices in Portugal – something markedly underreported in this country as the nation’s media spends hours every day focusing on what PS Socialists are saying about the PSD, and vice-versa. For people struggling to make ends meet and/ or desperate for health care, current political focus will seem irrelevant.
natasha.donn@portugalresident.com
