Lol, they should know.

To address your points. 1 - They did not cut down on Education and Healthcare. The budgets for healthcare have consistently increased during their legislatures. 2 - They did not save a private airline. TAP had 50% ownership from the State before being rescued. It had private management, but the state had as much ownership as private stockholders and workers together. Also, TAP was nationalized so now it is 100% from the state. Should they privatize it or not? That’s a discussion for other pints. 3 - As for the dams sales, the Secretary of State ordered the Tributary Authority to collect the money from those sales.

Are they as left wing as they should be? No they’re not. But they are not the worst one by far. If you don’t remember or were old enough the last PSD/CDS government or Cavaco’s governments I can assure they were a lot worse. And there are stark differences between how the governments of each party have acted with different leaders. Costa’s PS is starkly different (and less corrupt) than Sócrates’s PS. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t scandals (there are), but the scale of corruption is much smaller. Compared with the last PSD/CDS government which privatized the CTT, the freight train portion of CP (CP carga), gave a monopoly to Vinci in the management of airports in Portugal, wanted to privatize the public transport of Lisbon, and TAP among many other issues the difference is stark. You should probably try to distinguish the shades of gray instead of seeing dark everywhere.

The problem is not politicians and politically connected assholes. You had a liberalization of the renting market done by the previous right-wing government, coupled with the appearance of Airbnb and low interest rates for a decade. This led to a situation where it was cheap (low interest rates) to invest in real estate, place your new apartment on AirBnb and easily recover the investment. Old landlords caught up to this and many preferred to evict tenants or increase the value asked to close to what they would get if they rented the apartment via Airbnb. And there was still the many years of golden visas for foreign investors, also implemented by the previous right-wing government. The left-wing government never did anything to change this, because all this real estate investment brought GDP growth to Portugal and when they proposed some semi-serious changes you had everyone benefiting from this status quo screeching that Portugal was becoming Venezuela.

But it’s now got to a point where the prices are unsustainable to almost everyone and as you said a lot of people are excluded from being able to buy a house. And the situation won’t improve in the next couple of years because interest rates probably will take a while to go down. As for the brain drain, that’s an old historical problem. Heck, I had to emigrate last year and I am almost 40. The lack of stable work contracts, the non-existent salary growth from both the public and private sector already made thinking about settling down and having kids hard. These housing prices are just the final blow to the situation.

Thanks for letting me know that things can always get worse. lol

In Portugal, we receive 14 months of salary. The normal 12 months and 1 month salary as vacation subsidy, and another as Christmas subsidy.

Hopefully the rate of installation increases drastically over there.

Portuguese here. The rental market in Portugal is completely separated from the reality of portuguese wages. As an example, minimum wage is 750€/month per 14 months. Meaning 875€/month if you count 12 months.

Rents in Lisbon for a bedroom usually start around 500€. And the situation in the other cities with somewhat decent jobs is getting as bad as in Lisbon.

Wow, what an amazing post!! Amazing. Here’s a medal:

🏅

Technically they did win. But they don’t have an absolute majority, while PSOE can form an absolut majority with Somar and independentist parties even if it’s unlikely. They’ll probably have new elections in 6 months or so.

Nice. They need to keep going.

Well, the finnish coalition government would fall if the majority party would request the leader of the SP to resign. We are at the point where conservative governments can’t be formed without extreme right wing support. In 10 years it might happen that conservative parties will be the junior partners in these coalitions. In Finland the SDP increased their voting % as well, just not enough to win. So if there’s snap elections they might be able to recover power.