Opinion: Portugal Covid Management – Among the Worst in the World?

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) In a statement on January 21st, in which he shamelessly blamed the population for the surge in Covid cases, Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa drew a surprising conclusion, to say the least: “This is not the time to take advantage of the loopholes in the law and do what should not be done”.

In a moment of national agony, Costa referred to the people as transgressors. Most of us are not looking at how to take advantage of the “loopholes in the law”. Instead, we are trying to survive as best as we can.

Interestingly, this statement comes from the leader of a party that over the past decades has specialized in exploiting all loopholes in the law to satisfy its voracious appetite for power. Costa limits himself to judging the Portuguese according to his own party’s behavioral patterns.

Since at least June 2020, the rhetoric of unpredictability and ignorance of the virus has ceased to be admissible to justify certain tragic inadequacies to the most unwary.

The existence of the virus had been known since December 2019, and by June 2020 there were already several significant data on its behavior and how to mitigate its spread.

The scientific community, anticipating the unavailability of treatment or a vaccine, was expressing serious concerns about the autumn/winter and alerted countries to the need to plan adequately for this time.

Faced with all this knowledge, what did Costa do?

The Prime Minister’s “loopholes”

With the Portuguese confined at home, left-wing parties celebrated on April 25th (the anniversary of the 1974 “Carnation Revolution”that overthrew the dictatorship), with no masks, to prove who controls the regime and that what applies to everyone else doesn’t apply to them.

Then they opened loopholes for labor unions to celebrate May 1st (Labor Day) and for the PCP (Portuguese Communist Party) to hold their annual festival (Avante) in September, gathering hundreds, the political decisions of a minority government that is deprived of the power it so eagerly craves without this parliamentary support.

The Communists’ vote in the State Budget paid for the Avante festival. A kind of evil ‘quid pro quo’.

Meanwhile, the Champions League soccer tournament was played out in Lisbon, self-praises for a Portugal that achieved much better results than most European countries, and pictures of the Prime Minister and government officials on the beach and on vacation, as if the pandemic were a thing of the past.

In April last year, we were told of a miracle regarding the epidemic. As we can see now, there was no miracle. However, in politics, there is indeed a miracle: it lies in the apparent comfort with which the power elite in Portugal presides over the epidemic crisis, economic decline, and institutional deterioration.

In the United States or in Brazil, we have seen rulers fairly or unfairly held accountable for infections and deaths. In Portugal, with its emergency rooms packed with exceptions for the PCP and its ideological ramblings against part of the healthcare system, the government seems free to make mistakes at no cost.

Never before has a government been so dominant over an increasingly weakened and dependent society. The greater the economic stagnation and fiscal oppression, the fewer barriers to the state exist in civil society and the less challenge to socialist power in the public arena.

The pandemic was, for socialism, a gift from the gods. It closed many companies, undermined others, and subjected even more people to public favors.

For seven months, casual workers afflicted by the pandemic have been waiting for support from the government.

Aid was passed in July 2020, applications opened in September, and the first payments of a shameful EUR 438.81 were only processed in November. There are still hundreds of casual workers, self-employed and many others with no social protection, who have not received any payment from the government of the so-called Extraordinary Social Support for Workers.

This public aid aimed at mitigating the devastating social impact of confinement, however, fell far short of the new capital injection into Novo Banco, released in May. Spending on the bank (to make yet another recapitalization) reached EUR 1.035 million, 40% more than public spending on lay-off and protection for the self-employed.

The successive injections of public funds into Novo Banco (because the Resolution Fund, the institution belonging to commercial banks that should be recapitalizing NB, lacks funds) were the subject of heated controversy, and even jeopardized the approval of the 2021 State Budget.

But here the “quid pro quo” remedied the situation, at the expense of those who were already starving.

Since August 2014, when the Espírito Santo Bank went bankrupt, the Resolution Fund (with taxpayers’ money) has injected EUR 7.9 billion into Novo Banco by way of loans. This seems like a kind of comedy to the people, were it not for the people’s obligation to pay it back, with what they no longer have.

TAP will cost an extra EUR 300 per Portuguese

The EUR 3 billion injected into TAP Portuguese air carrier represents EUR 300 per Portuguese citizen. In other words, each Portuguese has to symbolically pay EUR 300 for TAP with no prior guarantee that TAP will no longer incur losses while the government accepts that the company may never reimburse the full amount.

Even Ryanair’s CEO, Eddie Wilson, considered the support granted to TAP to be “scandalous”, calling it “the biggest waste of money ever in Portugal”.

Over the last 10 years, TAP has only closed its annual accounts in the “green” once. In 2017, the national airline recorded a positive net result of EUR 21.2 million. During that decade, it accumulated EUR 640 million in losses.

Meanwhile, divestment in healthcare led to more deaths from Covid-19

The Covid-19 crisis exposed the fragility of long-term care structures in Portugal, which recorded higher rates of contamination and mortality.

Before the outbreak of Covid-19 it was projected that spending on long-term care would record one of the largest growths in the European Union (as a percentage of GDP), according to the EU.

“Further efforts are called for to improve the efficiency and capacity of health and long-term care to cope with the current crisis, as well as to address the challenges posed by demographic ageing,” advised Brussels.

Costa looked the other way.

At a time when each day that dawns is worse than the previous one – and when infections, deaths and hospitalizations set new records every 24 hours – the pressure on hospitals is mounting, not only in the Lisbon region, which has been the hardest hit by the pandemic in recent weeks, but across the country as a whole.

“In a few more days we will collapse and we won’t be able to open any more places, people who need intensive care because they’ve had a severe case or a car accident may not have a place,” alert exhausted doctors in Lisbon hospitals.

After eleven months of pandemic, all the Prime Minister had to show us was his ineptitude for the position he holds, in such troubled and challenging times.