Sara Miller Llana writes: At the height of Portugal’s economic crisis, Fernando Fernandes was forced to close seven of the 10 clothing stores he spent his life building – working so hard he missed the birth of his first son. But when he found out he lost nearly half of his life savings last year, after Banco Espirito Santo collapsed, he took to the streets.
Yet when Mr. Fernandes casts his ballot on Oct. 4 in Portugal’s general election, he’ll have no anti-austerity, anti-EU party to register his frustration. A competitive one doesn’t exist.
Portugal is held up as the poster child of austerity that works, having successfully exited its bailout program last year. Exports are rising and the economy expanding. Most notable, from the vantage of Brussels at least, it does not have a firebrand party like Syriza from Greece or Podemos in Spain attempting to redraw the political map.
Domestic politics is central to why Portugal is a political outlier in the region. While the Socialists were in power when the country needed to be bailed out, the then-prime minister resigned and the conservatives won the snap election, without needing the center-left in a coalition.
Portugal also has a strong Communist party, which wins roughly 10 percent of the vote and leaves less space for a populist left.
The leftist parties that have sought to emulate Syriza or Podemos are bitterly divided, leaving none with power to harness change. The group LIVRE is polling at about 3 percent and the older Left Bloc at 5 percen
Still, the lack of vocal populism does not equate with lack of frustration in Portugal.
Many young people have responded to the crisis by leaving Portugal. Many of them listened to their prime minister when he said the best response to high youth unemployment was for the young to emigrate.
“They prefer to emigrate rather than make a revolution,” says Pedro Figueiredo, another tour founder.
Even the youths who have stayed local, however, seem resigned to the fact that their politics isn’t going to shift the status quo.
That is a sentiment that is even stronger among older groups, says Mr. Villaverde Cabral. And if the response of youths has been to flee, the response among those who stay in the country’s aging society has been to refuse to vote. “They’d rather abstain than create a new left-wing party,” he says.
Part of the reason is a temperament that is not like that of many countries in southern Europe. Portugal lacks the sort of internal regional divides that characterize Spain, and didn’t have a 20th century civil war like Spain and Greece. And while Portugal did have a dictatorship, it was not as bloody as those in Spain and Greece. The country even strikes less than its counterparts, says Costa Pinto, which he sees as a symptom of a much less active civil society.
