Little Lisbon loses patience with Portugal’s left

The O Cabaz café (Paul Ames)

Little Lisbon loses patience with Portugal’s left

Small town in rural England illustrates problems facing Portugal’s new Socialist premier.

By PAUL AMES 12/8/15, 5:30 AM CET

http://www.politico.eu/article/costas-thetford-challenge-costa-portugal-election-left-united-kingdom/

THETFORD, England — In the anti-austerity iconography of Portugal’s new left-wing rulers there are few symbols more potent than the wave of emigrants forced to abandon their homeland by poverty and unemployment during four years of government of the right.

The left made emigration a major issue in the October 4 election which — after eight messy weeks — led to the Socialist Party forming a minority government, backed by the Communist Party and the radical Left Bloc.

New Prime Minister António Costa wants to roll back austerity and boost the domestic economy to encourage migrants to return, but his plans weren’t generating much enthusiasm on a chill winter’s morning in East Anglia’s “Little Lisbon.”

“Costa’s not the right person, I don’t think they’re up to running the country,” says Carla Perdiz, serving up custard tarts and shots of strong, black coffee in Thetford’s O Cabaz cafe. “The old government should have been allowed to finish its work.”

Britain outpaces Switzerland and Germany as the preferred destination for the more than 500,000 Portuguese estimated to have left their homeland since 2010.

“According to the left-wing narrative, the years of austerity have forced Portuguese workers into sweat-shop conditions in northern Europe.”

In Thetford, the local Citizen’s Advice Bureau estimates almost a third of the 28,000 inhabitants are Portuguese. They mingle with a sizable eastern European community, mostly from Poland and Lithuania.

The migrants have been coming since the late 1990s, attracted to the historic market town in the heart of England’s rural East Anglia region by plentiful food factory jobs — packing meat, processing poultry, turning beets into sugar.

According to the left-wing narrative, the years of austerity have forced Portuguese workers into sweat-shop conditions in northern Europe, often leaving highly qualified youngsters slaving in menial jobs while the motherland faces demographic meltdown deprived of its best and brightest.

“These people have effectively been expelled from their country,” Left Bloc leader Catarina Martins declared in September as she launched the party’s election campaign in Paris, a city that is home to around a quarter of a million Portuguese. “They’ve been abandoned.”

Disappointed diaspora

Popular singer and austerity critic Pedro Abrunhosa caught the mood with a lament entitled “For my mother’s arms.” A regular on radio playlists for the past two years, it tells of migrants longing for maternal comforts as they toil in cold Paris, dark Amsterdam and a Germany that is “so grey.”

In October’s election, however, the migrants didn’t return the left’s embrace.

The center-right coalition led by former prime minister Pedro Passos Coelho captured three of the four parliamentary seats reserved for the 2.5 million Portuguese living abroad. Just one went to Costa’s Socialist Party.

Among emigrants, the combined vote of the Socialists, Communists and Left Bloc was just 27 percent, compared to their overall score of just over 50 percent. The diaspora gave the right 44 percent, five points higher than their national total.

Thetford hairdresser Marlene Vieira was clear why she thinks emigrants aren’t convinced by the left.

“The former government made lots of cuts and raised taxes, but we had to do it, we had to make sacrifices to put Portugal back on its feet,” Vieira told POLITICO in her salon, sandwiched between the 15th century Bell Inn and a Lithuanian grocery story.

“This government will knock down all that good work,” she added. “Austerity did cause more emigration, but it had to be done to put the country back on its feet.”

Thetford’s cool reception for the new government highlights many of the problems facing Costa, who presented his program to parliament this week and immediately needed votes from the Communists and Left Bloc to survive a rejection motion from the right.

The new prime minister has to overcome a polarization of society and disillusionment with politics. For many Portuguese that has been heightened by the aftermath of the election in which Costa’s Socialists were beaten by the center-right coalition, but managed to oust Passos Coelho’s government after striking an unexpected and unprecedented deal with the far-left.

“Costa’s biggest problem is reviving an economy that was stagnant for the best part of a decade even before the eurozone debt crisis”

“They’re all the same, one goes out, another comes in, you still have to work night and day there and then pay all your money in taxes without ever knowing where the money goes,” complains Fernando Moreira, 63, a butcher working in a meat plant. “At least here I can see my taxes being put to use.”

Out of sight, out of mind

Apathy was the biggest winner on October 4, with a record 44 percent not bothering to vote. Abstention among Portuguese living abroad was 88 percent.

“I just don’t care about politics there,” says Rui Maia, 21, a van driver who’d just stepped out of a Thetford employment agency with a new job delivering refrigerators. “In Portugal, it’s hard to find work. Here’s it’s easy. I only miss the place at Christmas and New Year.”

Customers at Julio’s Boat — a floating restaurant moored in the Little Ouse river — barely looked up from their lunches of stewed gizzards and garlic-infused pork sandwiches to watch Costa’s swearing-in ceremony on Portuguese satellite television. A couple of old timers cradling bottles of Super Bock beer at the bar muttered some “kick-the-bums-out” comments.

Costa’s biggest problem is reviving an economy that was stagnant for the best part of a decade even before the eurozone debt crisis pushed it into deep recession. Growth has revived since 2013, but remains too anemic to stem the 100,000-a-year outflow of migrants.

Plans included in the government program approved by parliament this week include reversing cuts to pensions and public sector salaries; raising the minimum wage; boosting investment in public works, health, social services, education and research; support for start-ups and other businesses; reducing sales and income taxes.

Costa insists he’ll do it while respecting Portugal’s commitments to meeting eurozone targets on reducing the debt and deficit. “This government will do nothing that puts into question our treaty obligations,” he told lawmakers on Wednesday.

Costa also promised to “concentrate resources” on creating jobs for qualified youngsters to stop the country “haemorrhaging young emigrants.”

How he’ll do it is unclear. Even with his plan to gradually increase Portugal’s monthly minimum wage from the current €505 to €600, it will still be less than half the British rate.

There are plenty of cases where Portuguese migrants are exploited on low pay, long hours and zero job security. Yet it’s not hard to find Portuguese mechanics in Munich, IT guys in Paris or teachers in Angola with positive stories and scant desire to return.

“There are people here who had good jobs, office jobs, civil service jobs and now they are in factories or working as cleaners,” says Vieira, the hairstylist. “But then you look at our nurses who are coming to England, they are very successful here, they are learning new stuff, gaining experience, new skills, new opportunities.”

Portuguese nurses are in big demand. More than 12,000 have gone to work abroad over the past seven years, with Britain the prime destination.

In the short or medium term, Portugal is not going to be able to compete with northern Europe on salaries, but Costa is hoping that an investment- and consumer-fueled economic recovery might just persuade more people from leaving.

Authors:

Paul Ames