by DICK NICHOLS
Delegate votes during the Left Bloc’s eighth national convention. PHOTO/www.bloco.org.
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — A spectre is haunting Portugal ? the spectre of Greece and of Syriza, its radical left party. All the powers of neoliberal Europe, led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcise this spectre.
Accompanied by representatives of German big business, Merkel ran the gauntlet of protesters in Lisbon for six hours on November 12. She congratulated Portugal’s Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho for his “courage” in applying austerity (a “success story”) and urged the country’s most unpopular political leader to stick to his guns.
Two days earlier, Portugal’s most respected politician, Francisco Louçã, retiring national coordinator of the Left Bloc (Bloco de Esquerda) had told that party’s eighth national convention: “We struggle relentlessly for the resignation of Passos Coelho” because “the people can’t withstand the destruction, the unemployment, the impoverishment, the economic degeneration”.
As a result of policies imposed as a condition of the 78 billion euro “rescue package” by the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund (the Troika), austerity has shrunk the Portuguese economy by 3.3% in the year to September 2012.
Official unemployment has risen from 12.4% to 15.8% and youth unemployment from 30% to 39%. Young people are flooding out of the country in search of work and ever greater numbers of people in Portugal are going hungry.
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