Europe Elects: Portugal | Parliament Election 2019

This is the YouTube service of Europe Elects. Poll aggregation and election analysis for countries in the European Union. Europe Elects introduces the main political parties ahead of the 06 of October 2019 parliament election in Portugal.

The Guardian: ‘I want my country’s image to be good’: has Romania’s ruling party moved on?

In less than 48 hours in May, Romania’s ruling party was given a triple dose of reality when it was badly beaten in European parliamentary elections, rebuked in a referendum on its attempt to reverse tough anti-corruption laws and had its powerful party leader, Liviu Dragnea, jailed for three-and-a-half years for abuse of office. [...]

More than 80% backed a ban on the government having powers to change judicial legislation by emergency decree and the use of pardons in corruption-related cases, as the PSD’s vote share simultaneously more than halved from the 45% it won in the 2016 general election. [...]

In the aftermath of the May votes, Dăncilă vowed to abandon the controversial judicial proposals, a pledge she reiterated this week. “We have understood the message from 26 May. We have not spoken about the justice system, we have not let anybody get involved on that topic … I would like to go back to the agenda that is focused on the citizen, less on the justice system,” she said. [...]

Dăncilă would not be drawn on whether her government would continue to oppose Kövesi’s appointment, but said that she personally believed Kövesi must “solve her issues with the justice system” before taking this kind of role. “What do we do if those accusations are real? I don’t know if they are real or not, it’s a hypothesis, but I believe that the Romanian image will be affected and I want my country’s image to be very good,” she added.

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Politico: Portugal’s opposition woes

Unlike almost everywhere else in Europe, Portugal’s mainstream conservatives face no credible threat from populists on the right. Instead, they are split into three rival parties defined by personal rather than ideological differences. [...]

Rio’s Social Democratic Party (PSD) remains the largest on the right, but polls show it heading for its worst-ever European Parliament result. Its support languishes below 25 percent, 15 points behind Costa’s Socialist Party (PS). [...]

Rio eventually won a confidence motion by 75 to 50 votes in the party’s National Council just before 4 a.m. but only after a 10-hour debate marked by mudslinging that's unlikely to win over disgruntled voters. [...]

The right still suffers from association with austerity policies introduced under PSD Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho in response to the eurozone debt crisis. Since gaining power in November 2015, Costa has overseen steady economic growth that’s cut unemployment by half.

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Jacobin Magazine: Voting With Their Feet

The citizens in the frontline were not, as some officials claimed, hooligans picking a fight with the forces of order. But the protests did soon turn ugly. After some people began to lob stones, eggs, and bottles at the riot police, the gendarmes panicked and responded with tear gas, pepper spray, and water cannon. Peaceful protesters were hit with clubs, women with their children were tear-gassed and intimidated, random passers-by were brutally beaten, and journalists were shoved because they were filming the abuse. 455 people needed medical attention. [...]

It is unsurprising that corruption is at the heart of the current protests. This plague is rooted in the early 1990s, and Romania’s transition from the old one-party Communist regime to democracy. Many “smart guys” who had held key positions during the Communist era remained in power and took over the private businesses which now absorbed public funds. The disarray in the transition period, plus the lack of democratic institutions and civil society, allowed corruption to flourish. [...]

Almost four million Romanians — close to a quarter of the population — work abroad in all kinds of jobs, from doctors and engineers to cleaners and strawberry pickers. Romania’s 2007 entry into the European Union allowed its citizens far greater opportunities to make their way elsewhere — an opening many of them took. According to a recent UN Report, Romania in fact had the world’s second-highest increase in its diaspora between 2007 and 2015. With an average 7.3 percent annual growth rate in the number of citizens living abroad, Romania came behind only war-torn Syria (with an annual increase of 13.1 percent). [...]

In the wake of this campaign, the issue of the authorities’ disrespect for the law was again at the center of the next wave of protests. On October 30, 2015, sixty-four people were killed, and hundreds burned and injured, after a fire broke out at a Bucharest nightclub. The next day, the press reported that mayor Cristian Popescu Piedone had granted the club an operating license without the legally required permit from the fire department.

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Haaretz: Romania Starts to Confront Holocaust Past, but ‘Cycle of Denial’ Remains

But Antonescu’s regime was more than just any ally: Romania was Germany’s major ally on the Eastern Front after 1941, providing hundreds of thousands of soldiers to the Nazi war machine. As historian Timothy Snyder stresses in his 2015 book “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” Romania was the only other state to “generate an autonomous policy of the direct mass murder of Jews.” [...]

His words were heeded. In October 1941, after an explosion at the Romanian military headquarters in Odessa that Antonescu blamed on the Jews, Romanian troops murdered approximately 40,000 of Odessa’s Jews. According to Yad Vashem, 19,000 of Odessa’s Jews were taken to the harbor and burnt alive, while another 20,000 Jews were taken to a an outlying village to be shot or burnt to death. [...]

This “cycle of denial,” in the words of Holocaust historian Paul A. Shapiro, wasn’t broken in Romania until 2003, after then-President Ion Iliescu made several controversial comments about there never having been a Holocaust within Romania’s borders. “The Holocaust was not unique to the Jews,” Iliescu was quoted as telling Haaretz at the time. [...]

The report, as Geissbühler and others note, resulted in some positive steps in Romania. In 2009, a Holocaust memorial was erected in Bucharest, unambiguously stating that “the Romanian state was responsible for the deaths of at least 280,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews.” There have also been changes to school textbooks and education about the Holocaust, as well as a resurgent interest in scholarship in the field.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Portuguese Myth

Portugal asked for a bailout in 2011, one year after Greece, and from the beginning, it was treated as “the good student.” “Portugal is not Greece” was repeated over and over again. And it’s true. From the end of 2014 the European Central Bank, through the Bank of Portugal, was allowed to buy Portuguese public debt bonds directly, in a form of quantitative easing. This had two positive outcomes: it lowered the interest rates on the debt, and a part of the interest rates paid by the Portuguese government could thus be paid to the Bank of Portugal, therefore re-injecting money into the Portuguese economy. The European institutions never allowed the Syriza-led government in Greece to resort to such quantitative easing. [...]

The agreement allowed the left-wing parties to vote against some of the government’s measures, since they are not subject to the same discipline as in a real coalition. They insisted that this was not their government and that it wouldn’t solve the country’s fundamental problems, at the same time as they tried to answer the popular hopes of an end to the most damaging austerity measures. [...]

This is no miracle: it is the combination of internal factors (small income growth, a shift of the narrative around austerity and, therefore, in consumption patterns) and most importantly, external political factors. Not only do part of the European institutions support this government, but the country has also benefited from the political crisis in the Middle East, in the sense that it has driven a fall in the price of oil (an important factor for an import-based economy) and pushed tourism away from this region in favor of destinations like Portugal.

If we look closely, we can see other problems with this government. The troika labor laws were left untouched, collective bargaining has almost vanished, and precarity is on the rise. A study by the Observatório das Desigualdades places the real unemployment rate at 17.5 percent — much less than the 28 percent in 2013 but far above the official government numbers (8.5 percent). Almost all the new jobs that have been created are precarious. Public services are crumbling: both health and education are heavily underfunded and on the verge of collapse. The Portuguese banking system is a ticking time bomb, with more banks bailed out with public money but not under public control, leaving it more vulnerable to shifts at the European center than in 2008. The central question of the debt has in fact disappeared from public debate.

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Katoikos: Is Portugal on the path to solid economic recovery?

Costa’s left-wing government took power in October 2015, after ousting the Social Democrats (PSD) in coalition with the Popular Party (CDS-PP), following a censorship motion in parliament. Costa, the former mayor from Lisbon, vowed to reset wages and pensions as well as to reverse the austerity cycle that had pushed the country to its knees. Many deemed this coalition a failure, as it seemed, at first glance, unworkable – but significant progress has been achieved since the Socialist Party, backed by the left, took control over the country. [...]

According to the spring forecast released by the European Commission last week, “Portugal’s economic growth is set to rise further in 2017 before easing off in 2018. The labour market is also expected to improve with unemployment falling from 11.2% in 2016 to 9.2% in 2018. After turning out at 2.0% of GDP in 2016 the general government deficit is set to remain below 2% over the forecast horizon.” [...]

However, Portugal still carries a high general public debt as a proportion of GDP; it rose slightly to 130.4% in 2016, mainly due to higher issuance of government debt for the ongoing recapitalisation of the state-owned bank CGD. However, the ratio is forecast to decline to 128.5% in 2017 and to 126.2% in 2018, due to primary budget surpluses and continued economic growth.

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