Portugal limps into election that could tilt EU further to the right

Poll suggests beleaguered economy weighed down by onerous €78bn bailout will be the latest surrendered by a leftwing leader Portugal goes to the polls on Sunday under the yoke of a painful €78bn bailout and with socialist prime minister José Sócrates set to become yet another leftwing casualty of Europe’s economic crisis. Polls this week showed the opposition centre-right Social Democrats (PSD) of Pedro Passos Coelho between five and eight points ahead as Portuguese voters choose a government to see them through dire economic times. Passos Coelho is expected to seek the support of the rightwing Democratic Social Centre (CDS) party to form a government if predictions that the two parties will jointly win almost 50% of votes prove true. If Socrates is ejected the 27-member European Union will be left with five left-led governments: in Spain, Greece, Slovenia, Austria and Cyprus. Spain’s socialists suffered a 10 percentage point defeat in municipal elections last month, suggesting they will also lose power at a general election due by March. That could leave just four leftwingers, representing 4% of the EU’s half a billion citizens, at the helm of the member states. Europe’s pronounced tilt to the right is most noticeable in its approach to both the economic crisis and immigration, as well as in a tendency to shift power towards the European council and away from the European commission, according to the analysis of José Ignacio Torreblanca of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “The right blames the crisis on government deficits, while the left sees the origins in the private sector and the markets,” he said. The handling of the bailouts of Portugal, Greece and Ireland and their accompanying austerity plans reflected both the right’s power in Europe and its insistence that government indebtedness is to blame, Torreblanca said. Both Sócrates and Passos Coelho have accepted the basic conditions imposed by the EU and the International Monetary Fund for the country’s €78bn bailout. These require major cuts to public spending on health, education and pensions in a country with faltering growth and 11% percent unemployment – and a credit rating that is the second worst in Europe after Greece. Sócrates has accused Passos Coelho of a “radical agenda” to curb free healthcare and schooling. A recent Bank of Portugal report warned of “particularly severe” economic hardship over the next two years with an “unprecedented” drop in family income. A strike by drivers that prevented rail commuters getting into Lisbon and Oporto on Friday morning is part of a growing undercurrent of resentment amongst public employees, who stand to suffer most from the austerity measures. Alvaro Santos Pereira, a university economist and blogger, warned that Portugal could only pay back its loans if it grew at more than 3% a year, redistributed the debt contained in private-public partnerships and cut its deficit to zero. “If these conditions are not met I fear that, unhappily, a restructuring of Portugal’s debt will become inevitable,” he said. A snap election had to be called precisely because Sócrates failed to get further austerity measures through parliament. Portugal Europe European Union Giles Tremlett guardian.co.uk

Posted by on June 3, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.