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Delito de Opinião

Incontornável leitura

Sérgio de Almeida Correia, 16.02.14

"Moreover, many ministers from the current government acknowledged that, while revising the MoU, they specify existing measures, or even include new ones, with the specific purpose of decreasing opposition on policies that they favoured all along. In other words, ministers from the centre right used the intervention as a clear window of opportunity so as to induce a ‘paradigm policy shift’ towards their favourite neo-liberal stances."

 

"However, recent surveys asking voters about evaluations of the current MoU (after its seven revisions), and not about the original one, show that two years after the beginning of the enforcement of the MoU an overwhelming majority of the Portuguese (82.5%) defends either denunciation or renegotiation of the MoU.
This bailout, thus, have consequences for the democratic process. Even if it was originally not opposed by a majority of the Portuguese population, few of them might know (given the lack of transparency surrounding negotiations) how the bailout has been used by the government to pass reforms that it wanted all along. Moreover, the crisis and the intervention have divided the voters and their MPs to a large extent; and there is a huge mismatch of view between the rightist voters and their MPs on whether the government is allowed (or not) to renegate its former (2011) electoral commitments. This latter element is particularly worrying. A similar worrying picture (and the same huge mismatch between right-wing MPs and their voters) was found concerning the enforcement of the MoU and the increase in socioeconomic inequalities. Thus, even if some of the reforms taken in the last two years might be virtuous or necessary, the consequences of the bailout are not at all good news for the quality of democracy in Portugal."

 

As duas transcrições foram extraídas de um magnífico texto - Austerity Policy and Politics: The Case of Portugal - acabado de publicar na revista Pôle Sud, n.º 39, e os seus autores foram os Professores Catherine Moury (Universidade Nova) e André Freire (ISCTE-IUL, CIES-IUL). Constituindo o resultado de um extenso trabalho de investigação, em que para além de inquéritos, foram entrevistados quase três dezenas de membros do actual e do anterior governo, entre ministros-chave e membros "júnior", estou certo de que à medida que os anos forem passando e se for escrevendo a história, com os factos e os números que a maioria desconhece, vai haver muita gente a emudecer.

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