So I’m going to talk about the housing protests in Portugal, which have been going on for the last few weeks. I’ll go through what’s happening, how it got this bad, and then I want to connect it back to the Carnation Revolution in 1974, because I think that history matters a lot for how people there see this.
I’ll start with the numbers, because they’re pretty extreme. In Lisbon, the rent for a one-bedroom apartment is about 116 percent of the average wage. So if you’re earning an average salary, the average apartment costs more than you make. In Madrid it’s about 74 percent, which is already bad, and the usual rule of thumb is that rent should be around a third of your income.
House prices and new rents in Portugal have more than doubled since 2017. Wages haven’t kept up at all. The minimum wage is 920 euros a month, which is about 300 less than in Spain, and food is actually cheaper in Spain. And a lot of young people have just left. Around one in three young people born in Portugal now live in another country.
It’s gotten to the point where even people in the establishment are worried. The mayor of Oeiras, which is a wealthy suburb of Lisbon, said a while ago that if the housing crisis isn’t solved, there’ll be a revolution in twenty years. Based on the last month, that might have been a generous timeline.
So how did it get like this? Most of it goes back to the 2008 financial crisis. Portugal got hit really hard, and in 2011 it needed a bailout from the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF, which people called the troika. Troika is a russian word for a carriage drawn by three horses. The bailout came with austerity: cuts to public spending, cuts to wages and weaker labour protections.
To bring money back into the country, the government basically opened up the housing market to investors. They created golden visas, where if you were from outside the EU and bought a property worth around half a million euros, you could get residency. There were tax breaks for wealthy foreigners who moved there. Rental rules were loosened. And this was right when Airbnb was taking off and Lisbon was becoming a really popular tourist destination.
What happened after is pretty predictable. Investors bought up old buildings in central neighbourhoods like Alfama, sometimes pushed out the people living there, renovated them, and either sold them to wealthy buyers or turned them into tourist rentals. In one parish in central Lisbon, more than 60 percent of listed properties ended up being short-term rentals.
Economically, it worked. Money came in and the economy recovered. Tourism and real estate are now more than a fifth of the Portuguese economy, and the country gained thousands of new millionaires last year. But the people who actually live and work in Lisbon can’t afford to stay there.
What set off the protests this time was a new housing law. In September, Prime Minister Luís Montenegro’s government passed the first reading of a bill that does two main things. It lets landlords start eviction proceedings after two months of missed rent instead of three, and it ends rent caps on new leases. Right now, when a new tenant moves in, the landlord can only raise the rent a little above what the last person paid. That limit would go away.
The government’s argument is that rent caps and slow evictions make landlords less willing to rent their places out long-term, so loosening those rules would bring more apartments onto the market. Critics say that tenants not paying rent is actually pretty rare, so this doesn’t really address supply, it just gives landlords more power. And the timing is also a bit weird, because at the same time Spain was moving to block evictions.
The main housing movement in Portugal, which is close to the Communist Party, called a big march for November 14. But smaller groups didn’t want to wait that long and organised protests for October 10. In Porto, people copied what was happening in Spain and set up tents in the main square. It started with maybe a few dozen people. Police cleared it after a few days, the mayor said he’d be “implacable,” and people came back and set the tents up again. On October 17, Lisbon followed with a camp in Rossio square, and tens of thousands of people marched through the city that same day.
The government’s response is a big part of why this grew. Montenegro called the protesters selfish and suggested it was something imported from Spain. He’s also reported to own 55 properties himself, which people obviously noticed. The head of the government’s housing institute said young people needed to make more sacrifices and should emigrate if they had to, which went over about as well as you’d expect, given how many already have.
On October 20, police cleared the camps in Lisbon and Porto and arrested 55 people. Thousands of people went back to the squares the same day. On October 25 police cleared the Lisbon camp again, this time with tasers, dogs and batons, and arrested 25 more. People came back again, and on October 27 thousands of people rallied outside parliament.
So every time the government cracked down, the protests got bigger. And even people on the right have started saying it was a mistake. Prosecutors have said they might drop the charges against the people who were arrested, a former minister from Montenegro’s own party called the police operation a “tremendous error,” and the Liberal Initiative, which is a free-market party, said the repression wasn’t going to solve anything.
Politically, the government is in a pretty weak spot. Montenegro’s coalition has 91 out of 230 seats, and you need 116 for a majority. So for anything to pass, he needs either the Socialist Party or Chega, the far-right party, which now has 60 seats and is the second-largest party in parliament.
Chega originally said it would support the housing bill, and then changed its mind once it saw how angry people were. It did the same thing earlier this year with a labour reform bill that would have lengthened working hours. That bill got defeated after two general strikes. The Socialists aren’t supporting the housing bill either, but they’re also not trying to bring the government down. And the president, António José Seguro, who used to lead the Socialist Party, has basically said he understands why people are protesting but they need to follow the law.
There’s also a budget vote coming up on November 24, and it’s not clear the government has the votes for it. If it fails, the government could fall.
From a Marxist perspective, the main argument is that this isn’t really something capitalism can fix. Not because the politicians are incompetent, but because the economy depends on it. Real estate speculation is a huge part of how Portugal recovered after 2008. Actually making housing affordable would mean wiping out a lot of that wealth.
The government also doesn’t have the money to build its way out, since public debt is over 90 percent of GDP. The finance minister said a couple of weeks ago that the government has done “practically everything” it can. And honestly, within the system as it is, that’s probably true, which is kind of the whole point.
There’s also a question about the traditional left. From 2015 to 2019 the Communist Party and the Left Bloc supported a Socialist government, which people called the “geringonça,” roughly “the contraption.” It did roll back some austerity. But the criticism is that by propping up that government, the left parties ended up managing the system instead of challenging it. And as Chega grew, they focused more and more on defending the current democracy, which left Chega as the main party channelling anti-establishment anger.
Right now, the big demand coming out of the protests is a general strike across Spain and Portugal on November 11. When it was first suggested, a lot of people thought it was unrealistic, but the protest camps have now adopted it, and a tenants’ union in Madrid has asked Portugal’s main unions to join. The unions haven’t committed yet, but there’s a lot of pressure on them from their own members.
This is where I think the history of 1974 comes in.
The Carnation Revolution started on April 25, 1974. A group of young military officers, most of whom had been fighting Portugal’s colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, overthrew the dictatorship that had been in power for almost fifty years. The signal to start was a song called “Grândola, Vila Morena” being played on a Catholic radio station just after midnight. It had been banned by the regime. Hardly anyone was killed, and the name comes from people putting carnations in the soldiers’ rifles. That song still gets sung at protests in Portugal, including some of the ones happening now.
What a lot of people don’t know is that the coup was followed by about a year and a half of actual revolution. Workers took over factories, farm workers in the south occupied the big estates, and banks and major industries were nationalised. Housing was a big part of it too. People occupied empty buildings, neighbourhoods set up residents’ committees, and there was a government programme called SAAL where architects worked directly with people in poor neighbourhoods to design and build housing for them.
That period ended on November 25, 1975, when moderate military factions took control and pushed out the radical left. The constitution that came out of it in 1976 still includes a right to housing.
How people interpret that depends a lot on their politics. The mainstream view is that November 25 stabilised the country and led to the democracy Portugal has today. The view on the left is more that the revolution got cut off halfway, and that the constitution is a record of what was promised rather than what was delivered. Either way, the people protesting now are asking for something the constitution already says they’re entitled to.
I’ll finish with a few things I think are worth discussing.
First, is this a policy failure that a different government could fix, or is it built into how the economy works? Portugal has actually tried some reforms. In 2023 the Socialist government ended golden visas and froze new Airbnb licences in the big cities, and then the current government rolled some of that back. And Spain is blocking evictions right now. So I’m curious what people think about whether reform can actually stick. I know it’s a common topic to discuss but it’s very clearly one of the highlights of Portugal’s situation.
Second, what does it mean that the constitution promises housing and it clearly isn’t being delivered? I’ve seen this a lot of times personally as well. India’s constitution starts by basically calling India a hardcore socialist state but it’s turned out to be insanely far from it.
Third, what would success even look like for these protests? Getting the bill withdrawn, bringing down the government, or something something else?
And there are a couple of dates coming up that’ll tell us a lot: whether there’s a general strike on November 11, and whether the budget passes on November 24. If it doesn’t, the government could fall right before the anniversary of November 25, 1975.
Peace.