Under the heat of the warm sun on a late summer Saturday, I left my house in Vila Real and travelled the one hundred kilometers that separate it from Porto, Portugal’s second biggest city, where a demonstration of the Fifteenth of October Movement was supposed to take place. Here in my hometown, where pro-government parties have ruled since the Carnation Revolution, a coup led by leftist mid-rank army officers which ended forty-eight years of dictatorship on 25 April 1974, no demonstrations were scheduled and the few “indignados” had to go on their own to Porto, where a major demonstration and a popular assembly were to take place later on that same day.
The demonstrators started to gather in Batalha Square around 3 pm. The crisis and the absence of a clear political structure permitted endless creativity when it came to slogans and posters. Many participants held hand-made cardboard signs where they wrote their own improvised lines of protest. But if the forms were multiple, the content was identical: frustration, pessimism, and resentment directed against corrupt politicians and austerity measures. However, the number of participants was not as big as was expected: 100,000 in Lisbon and 20,000 in Porto. This was a significant outcome, one might say, but far from the level of attendance at the demonstrations of 12 March 2011.
To go back to that earlier time, two major moments helped in shaping the Portuguese “indignados” movement. First were the then-ongoing protests in Cairo and Tunis. Then there was the release of a song by the Portuguese group “Deolinda” about the sad predicament of the underpaid and highly educated young generation. This song, entitled “Que parva que eu sou!” (How stupid I am!), rang so familiar to young people in their twenties and thirties that it was rapidly adopted as a hymn of the protest movement. So inspiration was not lacking, and young people decided to take to the streets against all forms of the exploitation that they have experienced in the last decade, namely low wages, precarious working contracts, non-paid extra working hours, and alarmingly rising unemployment rates. Under the banner “Geração à Rasca" (which can be approximately translated as “Precarious Generation”), this heterogeneous movement, very similar in its essence to those behind the Arab Spring protests, defined itself as secular, non-partisan, and peaceful, and attracted more than just young college men and women to its ranks. It brought more than 150,000 people together in Lisbon and 80,000 in Porto on 12 March, though it failed to gather the same momentum as in Spain or Greece, for instance.
Although Portugal did not have a self-immolating Mohamed Bouazizi of its own, the country of fado has witnessed dramatic changes between 12 March and 15 October. The rejection by the opposition parties of a fourth set of austerity measures brought about a political tsunami leading up to parliamentary elections on 5 June. The election outcome carried away the two-term prime minister José Sócrates (who had come to be known as the Portuguese version of Tony Blair) and his center-right “socialist” party. Instead, it brought to power a right-wing neoliberal government headed by Pedro Passos Coelho, a Portuguese impersonator of David Cameron, who opened wide the door for the draconian measures of the so called “Troika” (the World Bank, IMF, and EU). Passos Coelho has been eagerly and earnestly implementing even tougher austerity measures with little parliamentary opposition. Portuguese journalists and economists are very skeptical these days, and are constantly warning of an inevitable recession and upcoming chaos.
Classified as one of the poorest countries and also as one of the most unequal countries in the European Union, the Portuguese know that they have all the reasons in the world not to be sanguine about their country anymore. Salaries have been cut, taxes on essential goods like electricity and gas have increased from six to twenty-three percent, civil servants will receive neither holiday subsidies nor thirteenth month subsidies, and private workers will be obliged to work an extra thirty minutes every day. At the same time, the government utterly refuses to impose higher tax rates on the wealthy. All this, together with a highly restrained state budget, will push the economy to abysmal levels, similar to that of 1975.
Here history has something else to tell: 1975 was the year after the Carnation Revolution. Amidst civil and military unrest and right-wing extremist terrorist attacks, a different troika—a socialist troika—formed by the prime-minister Vasco Gonçaves, the President of the Republic Costa Gomes, and Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, who had played a directing role in the revolutionary coup and was at the time commander-in-chief of a newly created military department, was ruling the country. Portugal seemed to be heading fast towards becoming the first communist country of Western Europe. Could it be that history here repeats itself, and the fights of our parents will become our own? Will we re-enact the Hot Summer of 1975 throughout the Winter of 2012? Climate change can give us some help with the weather, but in the end, it is all in our hands: the new Portuguese “indignados.”