Portuguese Train Strike Goes into Sixth Day Ahead of Elections
Commuting will be one more issue on the minds of Portuguese voters as they head into legislative elections on Sunday, May 18.
The employees of the nation’s state-owned railway operator Comboios de Portugal (CP) have been on strike since May 7, demanding wages that keep up with cost of living increases, according to news reports. Minimum train service of at least 25% has been agreed between May 11 and 14.
The strike, which was called by more than a dozen unions, has affected travel for thousands of people across the country. Authorities have been unable to find alternative bus services for everyone, and those unable to afford a taxi or Uber have suffered hours of delays.
2024 salaries at CP range from just €897 a month for manual workers to €3,351 for a “senior technician,” according to a report published by CP. The strike started after the unions rejected the government’s offer of a €34-per-month raise on wages up to €2,631, and the machinists’ union last week declared that the strike is not political.
13 Arrested Over Bogus Residency Permits for 10,000+ Foreigners
A Portuguese foreign ministry employee, several entrepreneurs and a lawyer were among the 13 people arrested last week by the Judicial Police (Polícia Judiciária, PJ) on suspicion of running a criminal network to obtain Portuguese residency permits in exchange for millions of euros in fraudulent fees, according to Público.
The network helped at least 10,000 residency applicants willing to pay — in some cases, up to €15,000 euros — for a variety of paperwork necessary for the submission process.
While applicants could have obtained many of those documents legally, according to one PJ official, the network had access to a Ministry of Foreign Affairs stamp that allowed it to “approve” certifications that a person was living in Portugal when they were not, as well as bogus criminal background certificates, the police said, Público wrote.
AIMA Has Cleared 28% of Residency Permit Backlog Inherited from SEF
The backlog of close to half a million pending residency cases that were mostly left over from Portugal’s previous agency for immigration is now dramatically smaller: The Agency of Migration, Integration, and Asylum (Agência para a Integração Migrações e Asilo – AIMA) has cleared 27.5% of the 446,921 pending applications that it inherited in 2023 from the Foreigners and Borders Service (Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras- SEF), Expresso reported.
Of those processed, 84% were approved.
Not Enough Workers for Too Many Public Works Projects
Many Portuguese freguesias (parishes) that need to do necessary upkeep work, particularly around housing, and especially in Porto and Lisbon, are unable to fill public tenders for the projects, the National Association of Parishes (Associação Nacional de Freguesias, ANAFRE) told Lusa. The problem, one mayor told Lusa, stems in part from the parishes having to compete with projects funded with money from the Recovery and Resilience Plan (Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência, PRP — the European Union assistance fund for economic recovery following to the COVID pandemic).
Portuguese Power Prices Jump Almost 5X Following Blackout
In the wake of the history-making April 28 power blackout, wholesale prices for electricity soared almost fivefold last week, after Portugal disconnected its power grid from Spain’s, according to The Financial Times.
Meanwhile, EDP — Portugal’s largest utility company, which also operated power plants in Spain, according to Bloomberg — posted a 21% increase in profit for the quarter ending in March, in part thanks to that quarter’s average electricity spot prices close to doubling compared to the year-ago period, according to Reuters.
EDP also said that it doesn’t expect much impact from the blackout on its operations, according to Bloomberg.
