Discrimination || Portugal has “the ingredients” for a surge of the extreme right-wing.
Who says this is the outgoing High Commissioner for Migrations, Maria Rosário Farmhouse, who told Lusa news agency this week that she considers the fact that a number of Portuguese emigrants in France voted for the National Front party of Marine Le Pen “very scary”.
It shows, she explained, that the premise that “people who are discriminated against do not discriminate” is utterly false.
Experience, she told journalists, “tells me if I am discriminated against, I will discriminate even more. If I have difficulty being integrated, I will make it even more difficult for others. It is really incredible” to accept, but the reality is that if Portugal “does not continue to invest in intercultural dialogue and the management of diversity in a positive way”, the writing is on the wall.
“We have all the ingredients, mixed with an economic crisis, to see what has been happening in other countries in the European Union happen in Portugal,” she stressed.
Referring back to the Portuguese who voted for the extreme-right in France, Farmhouse added that the fault there had to be shared between the migrant community and the French government.
“It’s a Portuguese community that has never properly integrated. Many of the citizens have remained very closed within themselves and now they feel a threat from people who are arriving. They think these people will take their place, because they don’t really know what their place is.”
Up until now, she added, Portugal “continues to be an example of good practices when it comes to integration of immigrant communities”, but the economic crisis has caused “attitudes of racism and discrimination to be brought more and more to the fore”.
The difficulty, however, is impressing on governments how important investment in this area can be. “It is an investment that brings peace and social cohesion,” she told Lusa – but “before there are centres of conflict it is difficult to appreciate this”.
