PORTUGAL FOR SALE

Photo by jisoo kim on Unsplash

Of the various newspapers and magazines I read last week, one common theme was the exorbitant prices of the real estate market in Portugal. And while delving into this, It’s impossible not to talk about this subject along with a moribund economy and policies that benefit foreigners more than their residents.

In “Visão” you could read “the crazy prices of small houses” with figures that I would never have thought I would see in my country, with flats with just two bedrooms going for more than half a million euros in the centers of Lisbon or Oporto. A figure that no Portuguese middle-class would ever be able to afford in this life.

The same magazine's subtitle said that “between 2010 and 2022, housing prices in Portugal will rise 70%”. It’s not just a small increase — prices have practically doubled and, as such, have become inconceivable to a Portuguese person.

Well, taking a little of what I read, it’s no wonder that I, as a Portuguese, am outraged by this situation. It’s enough to go to the great urban centers, and walk around them, to ask ourselves where the Portuguese are. If, at first sight, a few years ago, we could think that the majority were tourists, now the majority are foreigners who are not there for a visit, but who live there.

Of course, whoever sold them the houses did a great deal and made a profit. But there is another side to the coin, where Portuguese families are being pushed either out of the country or to more peripheral areas, simply because city centers are becoming ghettos of the rich where the Portuguese family can never live.

And all of this is also happening with widespread endemic misgovernment. The government has taken desirable measures for foreigners, making it easier for them to get golden visas if someone invests a certain amount of money. My husband, who works in real estate, tells me countless stories of flats left uninhabited by some rich person who arrived at the building, bought two flats so that he could get a visa, and doesn’t even live there.

This is one example, among others. This last week on Expresso, a big Portuguese newspaper, João Pereira wrote that :

“We insist on attracting wealthy foreigners from all over the world, to whom we offer a paradise where they enjoy the same services but where they don’t pay or pay less tax than the general population. They enjoy our security, our roads, our services, and all the comforts with a discount that is only accessible to those who have enough money to move their residence to our country”.

And even more relevant and perhaps what a Portuguese person identifies with more is the fact that many:

“buy or rent houses at unbearable prices for the middle class, but which for them are still a bargain. With them, they bring rising prices and drive Portuguese families out of city centers”.

It’s a case of saying that Portugal has been constantly for sale. If in the recent past, large public companies were sold off to Chinese managers who now do whatever they want — like Energias de Portugal (EDP), the main electricity company, which, after making an exorbitant profit in the first semester of the year, they’re now saying that energy prices are going to go up again — now are private assets which are being bought out.

This would be beneficial if the Portuguese weren’t, as Ricardo Reis states that the Portuguese are “becoming a housekeeper in the houses where they grew up.”

There isn’t an average Portuguese who, even if earning two thousand euros a month — I don’t know anyone who earns that much — can ever afford a small flat that costs more than half a million euros.

In Porto and Lisbon, I don’t know how university students will even find a room where they can live, much less which family will be able to afford it.

But, of course, even here, you can see the obvious discrepancies in society. Because while the middle class will never be able to put a child in one of these rooms, at the same time, there is a whole market that was unthinkable when I was young. That of university residences for upper-middle-class children.

It’s a whole world already quite different from when I was eighteen when the only student residences were those provided by the government and thanks to which I could live and study.

Nowadays, flats are being rented in Lisbon for four thousand euros, which a few years ago, a little less than a person on minimum wage made a year! Imagine the numbers like this. Imagine making fifty thousand dollars a year and now seeing rents in your country costing 40 thousand dollars a month, and you’ll feel the financial suffocation that we also feel.

But these prices don’t exist only in big cities. You can find, more and more, even where I live, a whole change in society. A few years ago, we used to go to empty, degraded houses, and today we see them beautiful and restored, and of course, it’s a sight for sore eyes.

But we also see adults living in their parent's homes, an economy that is less and less for us, and the impossibility of starting a family in what is becoming the most aged country in Europe and one of the most aged in the world. Digital nomads, retired foreigners, and millionaires searching for Gold visas are pushing the Portuguese to another place.

Is this really that fair?

2- But the economy seems to be doing well, they say.

At first glance, the data seems encouraging. The shadow of unemployment that hung over Portugal for so long has receded to 2003 levels. This is something that seems that could cheer us up. And all you have to do is walk around Portugal, stay in a hotel, or go to a restaurant to see that there is no manpower in Portugal to serve us. It seems nice, isn’t it? So many jobs offer.

There are two classic arguments when it comes about to answer the lack of people to work. The first one that says that “nobody wants to work anymore” is the number one cliché.

There is some truth in saying that society has changed, and young adults have a different approach to life; hence it's harder to find people to work with. When I was a teenager, I always took advantage of these seasonal jobs to add some money for myself, and in fact, now I see several teenagers who seem not to want that — why is that, parents? But, as with almost everything in life, this is not the only explanation.

The pandemic has thrown people into unemployment, especially in the catering, tourism, and services sectors. These people have since found other jobs and are unable or unwilling to return. And having worked in the tourism industry for so many years, I can tell you that I would never return either.

It’s easy to understand why that is:

The salaries were (and are) miserable, and the working conditions were just as bad. Holidays, weekends, or overtime were not words in my boss’s dictionary. Every day or every hour was paid equally. And to make things worse, the family relationship, so important in my culture, began to be non-existent and disappear; socializing with friends was a luxury, all that, my life and my youth in exchange for 640 euros a month at the time. And today, almost ten years later, counting on this awful inflation, only 700 euros!

Now, this problem of lack of manpower is not only because people don’t want to work, but to the unattractive salaries that pull the most qualified generation to want a better-paid job or move away from here and look for a place where they can have a more dignified salary.

Many people may be reading these words and thinking that I’m exaggerating and that emigrating isn’t as bad as I’m sounding. But I know my culture, and trust me when I say that the family factor weighs a lot here.

It’s not easy for anyone to emigrate, to have to deal with and to submited themselves to another culturee. It’s all hard, but to live away from those we love the most its the hardest.

This isn’t an issue for some nationalities because the family connection is not the same as in Portugal, where the family will always come first.

Just so you know, one of these days, I had the displeasure of receiving a comment from a reader who told me that if I was unhappy with the prices in Portugal, I should emigrate to Brazil. This is a nonsolution, and in the era when everyone is offended, I could be offended too by this comment.

No, I don’t want to leave my country because if so many people want to come here, there’s a reason. And ifBrazilians, who must be the largest source of Portuguese immigration, move here, it’s because living in Brazil since Bolsonoro won the elections it’s like living in hell.

But no, this data about unemployment being down is not directly related to a strong economy. The Portuguese are becoming, nothing more and nothing less, the servants of big foreign millionaires while trying to survive in an economy that is less and less designed for them but directed to these big money men.

And no, this is not developing Portugal. It’s, on the contrary, putting an entire generation wondering what they’re going to do with their lives: where they’re going to live, if they’re going to start a family or not, or if they’re even going to leave their parents’ house, in a country in the European Union where it’s estimated that people leave their parents’ house at around the age of 35.

There is a fertile period for everyone, but no stork will help us this way!

3 —A drifting country

All this follows a huge policy of de-government initiated by the Socialist Party, which is socialist only in its name since it stopped being from the left long ago.

And this is what most deludes Portuguese society, which still votes for them, thinking that they are voting for a left-wing party interested in the people. No, they are completely adrift. A few weeks ago, the president of the second largest electricity company announced that electricity would go up as part of this whole price hike, which is happening everywhere, or we wouldn’t live in a domino economy.

The Prime Minister immediately came to deny it. Today, diesel is again rising, reaching the two euro mark. At the same time, the rise in electricity and gas prices has made the headlines.

Still, according to Expresso, the paper announces that EDP Comercial “will increase its gas bill by 170 percent in October. Galp will also raise prices. And electricity is going up,” says the paper, “a barbarity!”

Imagine receiving 700 euros as a salary, and from that salary, you pay around 50 euros a month for gas, and now you’re paying 170% more or 135 euros in total. If you manage to save food to eat, good luck. And let’s not even think about those who earn that and have children. I don’t know how they can even stand it….

Now, with a Prime Minister still on holiday, this news is still escaping the media. And likewise, in a holiday mood, the population doesn’t seem to have woken up to the world that is getting ready for an economic and social collapse, or hadn’t the water run out a long time ago in my city!

But until the last drop runs out, everything lives as if nothing happened. When all this blows up, I don’t foresee anything good coming:

A poorly informed population, with horrible mortgage interest rates, and in a world where it’s clear that they won’t give up fossil fuels; won’t give up doing favors for the rich and selling their dignity; and a world and a country that, like others, is walking at the sound of a capitalist bell on the way to a huge precipice.

My fear is whether we have really fallen and are only waiting for the crash that will kill us for good.

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