Portugal exited a punishing three-year bail-out almost a year ago, and the chief question facing voters in a general election in October is: has it worked? The ruling centre-right coalition led by prime minister Pedro Passos Coelho embraced a painful economic adjustment programme devised by the EU and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in return for €78bn in rescue funds, promising not only to implement the raft of tough measures, but to “go beyond the bail-out”.
Four years on, the two coalition parties are trailing in opinion polls behind the opposition Socialists, whose leader, António Costa, condemns the rescue programme as “an abject failure that has produced nothing but poverty”. However, the gap in the polls separating the combined vote of the right-of-centre coalition parties from the centre-left Socialists is narrow, at about three percentage points.
