The former general secretary of the PS. Pedro Nuno Santos, marked this Wednesday, November 26th, the ten years of the government solution that brought together left-wing parties with parliamentary representation and which became known as ‘geringonça’. He offered several compliments, but also admitted “errors” and “insufficiencies”, particularly in migration and housing policies.
For Pedro Nuno Santos, this “unprecedented government solution”, created in 2015, “It was immensely rich and deserves to be celebrated”. “But equally or more important is being able to draw from this period and this government experience the lessons that will allow us to regain the trust of the Portuguese”, wrote the former Minister of Infrastructure and Housing in an opinion article published in the newspaper Public.
“There were very few who believed in its viability, even within the PS”, recalled Pedro Nuno Santos, recalling “that not only was it possible” to reach an agreement, but it was also possible to guarantee that “the legislature came to an end, with stability and with great popular support”.
The opinion article praises the “great contribution” of the then President of the Republic, Cavaco Silva, for demanding, at the time, a written agreement, which “committed all parties” to this government solution. Referring to Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, the opinion is contrary. “The current President of the Republic, on the contrary, by not making the same demand after the 2019 elections, ended up contributing to political instability”, he considered.
From a Government that had the parliamentary support of the PS, PCP, BE and PEV, Pedro Nuno Santos highlighted the policies and their results. “The biggest and most important thing”, he said, was the proof that “the balance in public accounts cannot be achieved with austerity”.
He praised the “social advances” implemented by the ‘geringonça, such as the “decision to accelerate the replacement of cuts in income and various rights that had been suspended during the troika”, but also the increase in the national minimum wage. “The minimum wage broke growth records, but so did the level of employment”, he highlighted.
“In addition to unfreezing the legal mechanism for annual pension updates, we made successive extraordinary increases. We froze and reduced tuition fees; we ended the majority of user fees in the SNS and guaranteed free daycare and school textbooks”, he listed.
But “everything didn’t go well”, according to Pedro Nuno Santos, who spoke of “errors” and “several insufficiencies” that should “serve as a reflection for the entire left”. “We could and should have done more when it comes to public investment”, he acknowledged, talking about the consequences for public services and public administration salaries. “In housing, we should have started building many more houses sooner, but even so, it would never have been enough”, he argued.
“In terms of migration policies, we also did not do well”, he wrote to recognize that “the economy needed and managed to integrate the overwhelming majority of foreigners who entered Portugal into the job market”. Still, he considered, “the country was not prepared, nor was it prepared, to receive more than a million people in about half a dozen years”.
Pedro Nuno Santos ends the opinion article by stating that, despite the “extraordinary social and economic advances”, after 50 years of democracy, “the majority of the population” “struggles daily for their salary to reach the end of the month, while only a minority manages to accumulate and live freely.
In this sense, he writes: “We need to regain confidence to win elections, but we need to win elections to structurally transform the way the majority of Portuguese people live and how the fruits of their work are distributed.”