Montenegro opened a citizens' shop in Fafe (and used it to argue Portugal is doing better than it feels)
The prime minister said Portugal is more competitive than its partners, while conceding the difficulties faced by anyone relying on the health service, raising school-age children or filling a fuel tank.
Luís Montenegro spent Monday morning in Fafe, in the Braga district, formally opening the town’s new Loja do Cidadão. The one-stop public services centre had already been serving the public since 3 August, in the old Royal Center building, gathering government departments and partner bodies behind a single set of counters. The visit was listed on the prime minister’s official agenda for the day.
Standing among those counters, he delivered the week’s political verdict. Portugal, he said, is living through a good moment, and is more competitive than its partners — even against a backdrop of the storms that battered the country early this year, the Middle East crisis and the war in Ukraine.
The caveat he added straight afterwards
The claim came wrapped in a long qualification, and that is the part worth reading. Saying the country is doing well, he insisted, is not a slight against people’s difficulties: those who need the national health service, those with children in school, those at an advanced stage of life who need care, those at the pump paying more for fuel than they did a year ago.
Those problems exist, he acknowledged, and the government is tracking them and trying to soften them. The wording is careful in a summer when pump prices are up on 2025 and pressure on hospital emergency departments still dominates health coverage.
A shot at the opposition, too
On the same trip through the Minho, Montenegro also aimed a warning at the opposition, arguing the country does not want to go back to how things were. That is budget-season rhetoric, and it lands just as the Socialists have signalled they will let the 2027 budget through and vote against anyone trying to bring the government down.
Openings like Fafe’s give a prime minister the easiest photograph in politics: somewhere new, shorter queues, European money on the plaque. The rest of the speech belongs to the autumn.
Image: Lula Oficial / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
