Outgoing President of the Republic Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa has admitted his frustration at the fact that nothing over his 10-year tenure has managed to improve Portugal’s ‘poverty figures’.
There were around two million people living in poverty when Marcelo took office in 2016 – and there still are. It means that roughly one in five people in Portugal are ‘poor’ – as has been the case for generations.
Answering questions from reporters as he visited the Food Bank Against Hunger in Alcântara, Lisbon, today – on the first day of the latest food collection campaign – Marcelo agreed there was “sadness in (his) heart”.
“Two million Portuguese people is a very large number, and of those two million, almost 400,000 receive support from Food Banks, meaning that’s a fifth” of that total, he stated.
Marcelo’s hopes at the start of his mandate were to help eradicate poverty, and improve the situation for the nation’s homeless.
Neither ambition has really moved in any positive direction: increasing costs of living/ the housing crisis have not helped.
“Oh yes, I feel frustrated”, said the head of state who leaves his position in early 2026.
In Marcelo’s eyes, events like the pandemic and the aging of Portuguese society, have also not helped the fight against poverty.
Governments “did what they could, tried to do what they could” (…) but “Portuguese society and European societies are aging very rapidly, and aging means impoverishment” as well as “difficulty in turning things around”, he said.
Touching on the delicate subject of immigration, Marcelo suggests this “largely reversed the situation (…) but only partially.
“I don’t know if you have seen the recent figures (…) for births in hospital units in Portugal, where the number of births among immigrants has been rising rapidly, for a very simple reason: they are younger, they are more numerous, and in this way they are partially supporting the situation of the Portuguese population.”
In fact the gist of reports on immigrant births in one Lisbon hospital were that many of these were to immigrants who were not actually resident in this country. The inference was that they came to Portugal to have their babies because they could – but that this was actually causing (even more) constraints for the SNS state health system.
Whatever the reality, Marcelo is clearly saddened by the lack of results when it comes to the nation’s poor.
He thanked the Federation of Food Bans for the “many, many, many years of service to the country” which almost certainly will need to go on. And he did refer to his happiness at seeing more volunteers joining these ‘food drive’ campaigns ongoing through this weekend.
On October 17, the European Anti-Poverty Network (EAPN) Portugal warned of the persistent number of people at risk of poverty stressing that the phenomenon continues to be a structural problem in this country.
The Food Bank Against Hunger’s latest food collection campaign involves the participation of more than 42,000 volunteers in 2,000 stores, inviting people to share non-perishable food items with those who need them most.
The campaign runs until the end of today in ‘physical stores’, but extends until December 7th at www.alimentestaideia.pt.
Source: LUSA
