Government’s defeat over tolls marked “Day O of new era: opposition governs Portugal”
As weeks go, last week was a dreadful one for the centre-right government of Portugal which insists it will not enter into any kind of ‘agreements’ with further right CHEGA to ensure a political majority (and thus a semblance of stability).
As a result, the country is slipping into a kind of political Wild West.
Popular tabloid Correio da Manhã carries a four-image cartoon today that explains it all: it depicts a newsreader, who says in speech bubbles translated exactly (including exclamation marks): “The government thought it could govern alone, without parliamentary agreements! The Opposition Ventura, PNSantos and associates…
“PNSantos, the adventurer, ended the siege around CHEGA. CHEGA got rid of its red lines regarding the Left, and together they want to end the right wing government..!!
“Thus they ‘govern’, and every time the government goes to parliament, they deliver another €100 million in expenses!
“Confused?!! Calm down: this has only just begun..!!”
Friday saw sundry unions all emerging from ‘initial meetings’ with their respective ministers complaining of feeling ‘short-changed’/ ‘humiliated’, even ‘offended’ and ‘insulted’.
This suggests protests waged by police/ teachers/ court officials/ prison officials are unlikely to be called off (unions are all biding their time until the second meetings, to see if the government’s various offers can be improved) – further impeding the government in its apparent master plan of getting the country back on an efficient growth path.
Pedro Nuno Santos, visibly more ‘confident’ than he was immediately post-election result, has been telling interviewers that the government is simply fighting what it inherited: a hung parliament in which it refused to enter into political agreements.
The centre-right coalition “cannot act as if it has a great majority” in parliament, when it has “the same number of MPs as the PS”, he pointed out.
Elsewhere, online news service ZAP.AEIOU, which tends to précis news stories from various sources , carried the headline: “Day 0 of a new era: the opposition is governing Portugal”.
Could the picture get any worse? Apparently yes, it could.
Political watcher, João Pedro Coutinho – like every other political journalist/ leader writer – heard the non-PC comments that emerged from the president’s recent dinner engagement with foreign journalists, and has followed the various commentaries suggesting Marcelo may be ‘declining’ (whether mentally or physically is not specified).
Marcelo himself has picked up on these comments, telling a class of university students on the last day of his visit to Cabo Verde on Thursday, that he is “in shape” and feeling younger.
Concluding the session in which he spent over an hour and a half on his feet, talking animatedly, he referred to having entered the auditorium aged 76, and was leaving “aged under 25”.
As dynamic as that sounds, João Pereira Coutinho clearly didn’t buy it: “As I am not a neurologist or psychiatrist, I will refrain from making a diagnosis”, he wrote in his column today in Correio da Manhã. “But the problem here is not in the diagnosis; it is in the suspicion installed on the cognitive/ mental health of the president, which undermines his de facto authority in the middle of the ungovernability at play.
“If, as one presumes, the PS and CHEGA are warming the engines for new elections, what weight will the words of the president have for parties to put the interests of the country ahead of their own more immediate calculations?
“No weight at all”, he concludes. “And they (meaning the PS and CHEGA) know it.
“When they look at Belém (the presidential palace) all they see is an empty chair”.
Which, in final analysis, is not what citizens exhorted only a few weeks ago to ‘exercise their democratic rights by turning up to vote’, will have voted for. (Take that to its logical conclusion and one could deduce that new elections may not fill people with a great deal of hope, or even enthusiasm).
