Protests this weekend played out in the Algarve, Lisbon and Porto.
In the Algarve, they centred on the long-running local anger over tolls imposed on the A22 Via do Infante highway.
CUVI – the protest group set up to fight the tolls – staged first a vigil outside the holiday home of President of the Republic Cavaco Silva, and on Sunday were planning to continue protests, this time outside the Manta Rota summer residence of Prime Minister Passos Coelho.
“What people forget”, CUVI leader and local councillor João Vasconcelos told reporters. “Is that these tolls represent a 40 million loss every year. Where does this come from? All of us have our incomes exhausted, businesses are failing – while the road concessionary gets richer”.
This is the 3rd year running CUVI has staked out the holiday residences of Passos Coelho and Cavaco Silva.
“Doing nothing leads nowhere”, Vasconcelos explained. “But if we keep up the pressure, it could lead somewhere”.
MEANTIME, in Lisbon and Porto on Saturday small groups of protesters staked out branches of the new NOVO BANCO in protest to the billions of public money ploughed into the recent BES bailout.
The protests, organised through Facebook, promise to be the first of many as people wake up to the fact that the Governor of the Bank of Portugal’s rescue plan did not, in fact, take into account the money of small shareholders – many of them ‘ordinary people’ who have now seen the savings of their lifetime reduced to nothing.
For more details on the developing discontent, see next week’s paper edition of the Resident and our developing stories online throughout the week.
