In what one leftwing party member told the Financial Times was an "unseemly interference" in the election, Standard & Poor's upgraded Portugal's credit rating just two weeks before the election. S&P has long been accused of politicizing its credit ratings.
Forward Portugal is already backing away from some of its more bombastic attacks on the Left, and Coelho says his coalition would enter into "necessary agreements" with the Socialists in the future. Most commentators think the new parliamentary alignment is too unstable to last long.
The question now is, can the Left unite to roll back the four years of austerity that has impoverished the country? One in five Portuguese are below the poverty line of $5,589 income a year, and the minimum wage is $584 a month. Portugal has one of the greatest income disparities in Europe -- the top 20 percent earn six times more than the bottom 20 percent -- and education levels are among the lowest in the EU.
But much of the Left is not on the same page. Indeed, it did surprising well in the election considering its message was hardly consistent.
The Socialist Party is still saddled with the fact that it instituted the austerity policies in 2011 when financial speculators in the rest of Europe drove up interest rates on borrowing. Contrary to the Right's charge, the debt was due to financial speculation, not spending. The Socialists also had a corruption problem, so voters turned to the Right in the 2011 election.
With an absolute majority in the parliament, the rightist alliance slashed wages, cut back pensions, privatized public property and raised taxes. One of the few checks on the slash-and-burn assault was the Portuguese Constitutional Court, which blocked some of the more onerous austerity measures.
In this election the Socialists ran against the austerity policies, but the message voters got was mixed: roll back austerity, but abide by EU rules. However, given that it was the EU rules that brought on the austerity, it was a message that voters found hard to decipher. The Socialists were also silent on the debt, a large part of which is of a questionable nature.
A study by the Committee for a Citizen's Audit on the Public Debt found that most debt was not due to government spending, but massive tax cuts and rising interest rates. The Committee concluded that as much as 50 percent to 60 percent of most countries debts were "illegitimate."
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