"We have reached the limit. People are tired of making sacrifices
because you don't see any improvement whatsoever. Quite the opposite."
Marina Padeiro, 36, is one of Portugal's
estimated 1.3 million unemployed – a number that has shot up in the
past year and a half, as a result of the stinging austerity measures
imposed on the country in exchange for a €78bn (£62bn) bailout.
Sitting in a cafĂ© in the northern industrial belt of Lisbon, she shrugs. "If there was some sort of hope you may see a decent future … the problem is they are not showing it to us." Her father, a retired lorry driver, says the evidence is on the streets. Out here – far from the capital's pretty, cobbled centre, which still attracts tourists – shops are closed up for good, or open only sporadically.
Marina has been out of work for three years. In 2009, the insurance company she worked for said it would not renew her contract "because of the crisis", one month before she gave birth to her second child. "It was like taking the carpet from under my feet." The family now gets by on €600 a month, their diet supplemented by carrots, onions and fruit from her father's allotment.
She is not the only one to have reached her limit. Two weeks ago, hundreds of thousands marched in the streets of Lisbon and other cities across the country, in the biggest protest since the end of the dictatorship in 1974. The demonstration forced the prime minister into an embarrassing U-turn over social security reform – one of the first times a government tied into austerity as part of a bailout programme responded so decisively to popular revolt.
Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/28/portugal-austerity-mannered-populace?newsfeed=true
Sitting in a cafĂ© in the northern industrial belt of Lisbon, she shrugs. "If there was some sort of hope you may see a decent future … the problem is they are not showing it to us." Her father, a retired lorry driver, says the evidence is on the streets. Out here – far from the capital's pretty, cobbled centre, which still attracts tourists – shops are closed up for good, or open only sporadically.
Marina has been out of work for three years. In 2009, the insurance company she worked for said it would not renew her contract "because of the crisis", one month before she gave birth to her second child. "It was like taking the carpet from under my feet." The family now gets by on €600 a month, their diet supplemented by carrots, onions and fruit from her father's allotment.
She is not the only one to have reached her limit. Two weeks ago, hundreds of thousands marched in the streets of Lisbon and other cities across the country, in the biggest protest since the end of the dictatorship in 1974. The demonstration forced the prime minister into an embarrassing U-turn over social security reform – one of the first times a government tied into austerity as part of a bailout programme responded so decisively to popular revolt.
Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/28/portugal-austerity-mannered-populace?newsfeed=true
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