On the International Day for the Eradication of World Poverty, this is the grim verdict coming out of Portugal after three bitter years of austerity.
As the government prepares to introduce another “budget of rigor”, and statistics show that a quarter of all the people living in Portugal are at risk of poverty, economist and university professor Carlos Farinha Rodrigues has talked to Lusa news agency to explain that the social upheavals prompted by the coalition government’s policies since 2011 have put our “quality of democracy at risk”.
Stressing that, “even with a change of politics” (possible after next year’s elections), “the country will take many years before it is able to recover from the damages caused”.
“The policies of this government have clearly made the situation, in terms of poverty, a lot worse,” he told Lusa – accepting nonetheless that the country was already one of the poorest in Europe before the PSD/CDS-PP coalition came to power.
Nonetheless, political decisions made over the last three to four years reflect what he termed a “disresponsibility of the State” – a situation where the State has turned its back on the whole issue of poverty, leaving it very much in the hands of charitable and social institutions.
And while opposition politicians have pilloried the government for ‘anti-birth’ policies that have seen thousands of couples shy away from starting a family, Farinha Rodrigues concedes that children are among the hardest hit.
While child poverty is increasing throughout Europe, Portugal is “in the front line”, he told Lusa.
“Child poverty compromises the future because even if we can resolve the problems of bad diet – and there has been a huge effort to achieve this – we have to accept the link between the increase in poverty and the lack of success at school and academic drop-out rates.”
