A serious Portuguese accident.

My friend Thomas was admitted to Portimão Hospital with pneumonia and was discharged with Covid. That’s typical of Portugal’s healthcare system. Now the people have voted. I did some research in the British and German press to see what foreign journalists have written about these recent parliamentary elections in Portugal. I initiated my own international press review on Sunday at 12 noon and only found what I was looking for at lunchtime on Monday. On Sunday, I found the first analyses of the Polish and Romanian presidential elections. But what about the fact that a new parliament and a new government had been elected in Portugal… Oh yes, was there something else happening in south-west Europe?

An accident has happened in south-west Europe. On Monday, shortly before 1 pm, journalist Patrick Illinger wrote his first commentary in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s largest daily newspaper, with the following headline: ‘Portugal’s voters reward the corrupt, the pederasts and the thieves’. Patrick Illinger used to be editor-in-chief of sueddeutsche.de … He did his doctorate in Physics at the Cern Research Centre in Switzerland on the subject of ‘antimatter’ and is currently responsible for the Iberian Peninsula at the Süddeutsche Zeitung. The first and only German newspaper to mention the subject wrote a few lines on Monday lunchtime. I analysed the English-language daily press in the same way and found nothing at all, not even in the Guardian. At least, there was an interesting article about English cheese production and the journalist Lisa O’Carroll described the new ‘EU deal’ that the UK and the EU have just concluded as being ‘four years too late’ … So much for the parliamentary elections in Portugal.

The centre-right coalition, the alliance between the PSD and the CDS, known as AD (Aliança Democrática), received just under 33% of the vote. This does not mean that the alliance can govern in a stable manner. It needs a coalition partner if it wants to stay in power for longer than a year. The PS and the fascists each received 23 per cent of the vote. The socialists lost heavily; the fascists gained heavily. Where have the communists gone? Where has the left gone? They have been left out in the cold. The liberals have taken a few per cent, not worth mentioning.

The people are slowly getting a taste for it and electing their own butchers again. Who is André Ventura from the fascist CHEGA party? A former sports reporter who would like to become prime minister. And he could well become one soon. He just needs to be patient. Because the institutionalised parties, socialists and conservatives alike, will soon have to hand over the reins to the governance of this highly indebted country, where corruption is rampant. Were 48 years of national sickness and two generations of fascist government not enough to cure a nation of fascism? Or, to put it another way, have 50 years of democracy from 1974 to 2024 failed to stabilise this downtrodden nation with the lowest wages in Europe? The top-heavy bureaucracy of the Segurança Social has managed to line its own pockets, but, in doing so, it has come close to bankruptcy. What now? What can be done?

Whoever governs the country in the future will have to solve two serious problems: the healthcare system and the longstanding issue of school education. First of all, both areas need more skilled doctors and nurses, as well as more teachers – more qualified staff. Investments are needed. We don’t need new F35 bombers in the air force, which Portugal can’t finance anyway; we need a hospital system in which we have to radically reduce waiting times, in which we have to radically stop messing around with people’s health and in which a humane healthcare system is our role model. That must be the goal of any new government. A hospital reform. At the same time, we need fewer strikes in schools, more teachers and fewer dissatisfied people who don’t want to go to work, a school reform.

The new government should ask itself the question: how do I motivate my teachers in the long term, and therefore the children and young people who need to receive a better education? And this also includes the question of what is actually taught in schools? Subjects such as Portuguese, History, Philosophy, etc. should be scrutinised. I think teachers should no longer be a bad role model and should not go on strike every few weeks. They should be taken on as civil servants, enjoy the right to permanent tenure, receive good and transparent salaries and, in return, no longer have the right to strike.

We need to reform our state in many ways. Let’s start with the healthcare system and the education system. To do this, we need stable governments that can remain in office for more than four years and do not face the same conflicts every few months, which, inevitably, were not resolved yesterday. The spectre of André Ventura is just waiting for the next government to get its act together again. All he has to do is wait and talk. There are so many other problems that are difficult to solve: forest fires and climate change are just one of these. The next government has the task of minimising the consequences of this “election accident”. I don’t trust a state hospital where I catch coronavirus and want to be treated for pneumonia. But nor do I want to have to pay 1,000 euros in a private hospital for a day’s stay, which very few citizens are able to afford. I want to live in a democratically legitimised state and not in a banana republic like Portugal. With this in mind, I hope that the AD and the PS will join together to form a stable, democratically legitimised government that is free of corruption. I want you to be proud of your democracy, of mine, of ours…