Germany’s finance minister dubs Portugal a “success story” as President Cavaco calls crisis meeting

President of Portugal Cavaco Silva has called a Council of State ‘crisis meeting’ for Thursday next week after a debate on the ‘state of the nation’ in Parliament saw renewed calls for early elections. But elsewhere, as Europe decides today on its new leader, Germany’s finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble appeared in the press, calling Portugal a “story of success, like Ireland and Spain”.
In an interview published in Jornal de Negócios, Schäuble said that both the economy and Portugal’s employment situation were recovering, and that this dynamic would become “more and more evident over time”.
Only days before, Passos Coelho had told an initiative supported by the EC, to boost youth employment, that unemployment in Portugal remained, in his view, unsupportable.
As the government soldiers on, a parliamentary debate on the State of the Nation on Thursday saw both the Socialists and the Communists appealing to Cavaco Silva to call early elections.
The President has agreed to convene Council of State on Thursday July 3 at 5.30pm, with the theme “the exit from the troika and the next community funds”.