Is it just me who notices – and it could therefore be a personal limitation – or is the feeling of government inanition, after two years of the PSD/CDS Government, shared by other people?
It’s just that two years are not two days. And Portugal has one of the most generous systems in the world in terms of what allows a government to decide and legislate, without needing authorization or parliamentary validation. A government, in this country, even rules.
No government can tackle everything at the same time. This Government, for example, decided to invest political capital and conviction in a change in labor legislation. No one understood why, nor its convenience or emergency – that is, those who understood, did not share… It may result in some “flexibility”, which means that firing will be a little cheaper and hiring on a fixed-term basis will be possible for a little longer. And, of course, having half a dozen large companies set work hours more randomly and pay less for it.
Is this what refounds the Portuguese economy? Is this what attracts qualified labor? What most exists today, in fact, is Portuguese wanting to go and work outside the country, in exotic destinations such as Sweden, Switzerland or the Netherlands. Will they soon come running back, with some new labor legislation that tells them that they can be hired for a few more years and fired with less compensation, to pay their high taxes and Social Security – and private health insurance, this new burden that democracy also created, despite 25% of the State Budget being allocated to the SNS?
And they go to these gray and rich countries, from the outset, because salaries here do not allow them to buy fish and fruit and have a house to live in, those luxuries that Portuguese democracy managed to establish as such, 50 years later.
One would think that a government, whatever it was, would think, faced with the stampede of its citizens – and their replacement by others, whose criteria and needs are, unfortunately, even more fragile – it would like to do something about the fact that renting a house in Lisbon is more expensive than in Berlin, Amsterdam, Oslo or Vienna… Apparently, no. It’s just that lowering IRS taxation for owners to 10% could be nice. And it is – for landlords. Average rents, however, have increased.
And in Health, this chaotic world of institutionalized conflicts of interests and inexplicable delays and inefficiencies? Yes, we have an excellent NHS for the poor, which saves thousands of people – those who 50 years ago died at home, without ever knowing why, welcomed by the priest and other widows, 20 or 30 years before what would statistically be allocated to them. And that’s worth something. But it is not worth insisting on its unshakable virtue, for everyone, universal, and tending to be free. Nobody believes it anymore and, except in absolute emergency situations, nobody wants it anymore.
It could be a good time to then, with clarity, transparency and predictability, seriously put on the market (and not in the “Portuguese market”, which is what some use and the State pays for….) this good that was once considered public, Health, we all know that, today, it is not.
And what about “state reform”, that mantra with which we entertain ourselves in useless, repeated, empty conversations? Do you want to change the State bureaucracy? Just end public dependence on taxes, which infest our lives, feed public services and create the entropy we complain about. An administrative procedure immediately becomes fundamental from the moment it generates revenue… And as public financing and the rationality of procedures have never been properly evaluated, fear abounds in any political decision-maker to change anything, in their little house, which they will miss later.
Ah, what a beautiful country, always so predictable, so expected, so stable – those attributes that any recruiter on the market looks for!
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