Silly season stories will be compounded this summer by the fact that Portugal also faces a general election.
While sniping and snarling has been going at full throttle in UK, here it is only just getting into its stride. The pity is, Portugal will have to cope with it for longer.
Britain goes to the polls next month but we have until at least September to fend off spin and bluster and try and decide who we would possibly vote for, if of course, we were allowed to…
Taking this week as an example of the predictable drivel that we’re likely to be faced with, we have the gung-ho PS presenting their “plan for the next decade” and deputy prime minister Paulo Portas immediately declaring that it would deliver the country back into the hands of the troika.
Not prepared to let a jibe like that past, PS leader António Costa has retaliated saying the troika never left. It is alive and well and personified by the PSD prime minister Pedro Passos Coelho, deputy PM Portas and the eerily silent President of the Republic, Cavaco Silva – also on his way ‘out’ of a job soon as would-be contenders line up for his job, all grumbling about the “terrible corruption” that lays Portugal waste as it has done for centuries.
The PS claim they have a formula for “bypassing austerity, but staying within the euro”. For an electorate that is fed up with the former, and in need of the latter, it could well sound like a plan – but no doubt we will hear ad infinitum now how the PS sums simply don’t add up.
For now, the CDS’ upstanding leader who knows everything about rotten apples and trees that shouldn’t be on landscapes, it is “a plan of promises that doesn’t just risk disillusionment, but runs the risk of being turned into another memorandum of understanding in which each promise is transformed into a restriction”.
