We don’t even look at each other (or do we look?) said and promised before the 2011 elections; how, in the midst of the euro crisis, faced with the imposition of austerity by the European Commission and European partners (starting with Germany) and even after the bailout request, he refused the idea of cutting pensions or salaries or Christmas or holiday allowances, how he wrung his hands at the idea of increasing taxes and how guaranteed that everything would be resolved just by “cutting the State’s fat”. It was this simple and painless cutting of “the fats of the State” that, promised by the PSD at the time, constituted the famous “structural reforms” that to this day Passos praises so much and calls his “transformation project”.
The “structural reforms” that, once in power, resulted in cuts and more cuts in pensions, salaries and social support, tax increases and the sale (to the Chinese State) of key assets such as the electricity grid and EDP.
Hence it is truly delicious to see him now reproaching Montenegro for not having, and I quote, directed “to voters in that election [2024] asking them for a mandate to carry out reforms, with a reformist spirit.” This is because Passos says he believes “that the reforms that last are the ones that people want” and therefore “a party cannot reach the Government and, suddenly, show people that, after all, it surprises them with a package, a set of reforms that people did not expect to happen and that they might not even like to be carried out.”
This was, by chance, exactly what the current PSDB did with the labor reform proposal — similar to Passos’ strategy when he governed: present proposals, the vast majority of them unconstitutional (and declared as such by the Constitutional Court), which had never been submitted to vote. And it should not be said that there were supervening circumstances to justify it: when the electoral program was drawn up, Portugal was under rescue, and the terms of this rescue were also negotiated with the IMF-European Commission-European Central Bank troika by the PSD, as the party’s chief negotiator, Eduardo Catroga, never tired of proclaiming.
In fact, the director of the IMF for Europe at the time was PSD leader António Borges, who shortly afterwards Passos would invite to work as a kind of “minister at large” with responsibility for privatizations, in a direct transition from the body that had imposed them to a position whose salary of hundreds of thousands of euros the Government refused to reveal for months (only doing so when forced to). In terms of revolving doors and “serious precedents” (that was the expression he used in relation to the choice of Luís Neves for MAI), let’s say that Passos doesn’t have many lessons to teach.
Besides, it doesn’t have them in anything. The man who wants to present himself as “serious” and “transparent” and is so often referred to as the “moral reserve of the right” has already radically changed his mind and speech half a dozen times and was anything but honest when he stood up for election.
He knows well, and everyone should know, that if he had announced in 2011 what he really wanted to do and that his dream was to put into practice the constitutional revision that he put in the drawer in 2010 (when, remember, in addition to presenting himself as a liberal in the economy he also guaranteed to be so in morals, speaking in favor of the legalization of abortion, same-sex marriage and adoption by homosexual couples), it would be very unlikely to obtain an absolute majority.
But, let’s face it, there is a project to transform the country that Pedro Passos Coelho managed to bring to fruition: one that allows, after everything that has happened, everything he has done and said, to achieve an example of probity, honesty and ethics. Yes, that is work.
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