by ALEXANDER C. KAUFMAN
Lisbon’s mayor called for preserving Portugal’s liberal traditions and uniting against a party riling its base with racist invective targeting a minority.
On a warm evening when the croons of a fado singer in a dark bar where fingers slicked with oil glide between dishes of olives and wineglass stems echo down ancient limestone streets filled with late-night revelers from all over the world, it’s easy to forget that this ancient capital is in a political crisis.
Unlike in London, Amsterdam or Paris, Lisbon’s nearly 3,000-year evolution into a modern hub of cosmopolitan locals and international visitors came without a backlash in the form of far-right populists blaming foreigners and minorities for the problems in the city. Voters here had steered clear of politicians who harkened to the dictatorship that ruled Portugal from the Great Depression until the 1970s.
That is, until now. The wave of right-wing populism sweeping Europe’s democracies is finally crashing on the continent’s western edge, and keeping Portugal out of its undertow is going to be a “fight,” said Lisbon Mayor Carlos Moedas.
“We have seen the examples in countries like the U.S. and Brazil, where you go to the extreme and you break society. You really break society in two. And it’s very difficult to heal,” Moedas, 53, slender and bespectacled with thick but graying brown hair, said in a wide-ranging interview with HuffPost last month.
“So far, Portugal has been an example of moderation, but we now have to fight to keep that.”
Across this hilly city, where 1 out of every 4 Portuguese lives, are billboards for the first far-right party to go mainstream since the country returned to democracy less than 50 years ago. Called Chega — Portuguese for “enough” — the party is riding on a pledge to “cleanse” the nation of its political class. Its leader is a charismatic former sportscaster who rose to prominence by defying hate-speech fines to invoke racist “Gypsy” stereotypes against Portugal’s tiny Roma minority. After winning its first seat in Parliament in 2019, Chega won 12 out of 230 in the 2022 election.
Portugal’s economic revival after its 2011 debt crisis was impressive enough that pundits coined the term “sardine capitalism,” as a model for balancing the fiscal discipline expected by fellow euro users like Germany with the generous welfare state Portuguese voters demand. Portugal remained Western Europe’s poorest nation, where 1 in 5 reported being unable to afford heating bills in the winter in a poll taken before energy prices surged in recent years. Still, annual surveys showed more optimists than pessimists about the direction of the economy.
These days doomsayers dominate, with a vast majority of Portuguese adults telling pollsters in September that the economy has gotten worse since 2022. The sardine has entered what Bloomberg recently described as “choppy waters.”
Economic growth, which had outpaced other European economies after the COVID-19 pandemic, has begun to slow and factories are producing less. Inflation is slowing, but the cost of living in Portugal rose more over the past year than the continental average in every category of the official statistics. That squeeze comes with an extra pinch on workers whose wages are below average for a rich country, where half of workers earned less than €1,000 per month and the average salary had barely increased by 5% over the past two decades. That’s now hardly enough for a month’s rent in Lisbon.
As 90% of Portuguese adults will tell you, housing costs are spiraling out of control.
The Socialist government’s solution is to stop encouraging rich foreigners to buy up all the apartments by repealing special tax breaks and “golden visas” for real estate investors. The policy changes have done little so far to mute demand, with 65% of new sales going to foreign buyers.
Huffpost for more