Housing? Ventura points to “Insensitive government”, migrations and Costa

André Ventura reacted this Sunday to the issue of housing in Portugal, pointing to the “serious demographic and migration crisis”, the “lack of empathy” and “selfishness of the Prime Minister himself” and António Costa. The government, it considered, is “completely insensitive to the subject”.

For the leader of Enough, “we can try to mask the data as we want, but all or almost all the serious housing crisis we have experienced in Europe has to do with the serious demographic and migration crisis we face,” he said in statements to journalists at the headquarters of Enough.

“ Then we have the lack of empathy and the selfishness of the Prime Minister himself in this matter. A government that is completely insensitive to what is probably the greatest financial impact of our time on the lives of families. There are districts of Portugal where rents have increased by 75% in the last five years, where “the weight of income in the finances of families has become brutal”. 

And André Ventura continued to point to the Executive: “A government completely insensitive to the subject and to a prime minister who accuses those who fight for a right of selfishness: the right to have a decent housing and to live with their family in a dignified housing”. 

The leader of Aquista then considered that “a completely insensitive government, alienated from the practical reality of people, brought the results we have today”. 

“It was not just the rents that have increased brutally in recent years in Portugal. The bank interest of those who have a house to pay on house credit has become absolutely unsustainable, and have become unsustainable because, of course, the data show that the interest rate has risen severely in the last five years,” he said. 

For André Ventura, “we should talk about the real increase in impact and the income of the families that these increases have.” “It is impossible in a country where wages have stagnated, or have risen to eight or nine percent, to have 300% increases in the payment of their housing. It is impossible to think that this will be solved easily, it is unthinkable to think that the market will solve this alone, or evicting people, or creating laws that allow to increase rents savagely or also completely unprotecting owners ", explained.

“What this radical left does not see,” he continued, “is that if people who have houses do not rent them, there will also be no houses to rent.” Thus, for Ventura, “it is not to attack either owners or tenants that we will solve the housing problem.”. 

André Ventura also accuses António Costa

In the same statement, André Ventura considered that “in the last five years, Portugal had a housing problem that was not only created by the international context. It was created by a context of its own, of artificially increasing its population, causing people who needed home and a place to be to enter the territory uncontrolledly.”. 

“ This increase, the responsibility of António Costa, essentially, and after Luís Montenegro, was not accompanied by a proportional increase in the construction of new houses or the facilitation of putting houses on the market to rent”, and, he advocated Ventura, “on the contrary, people knew, as they know today, that if someone decides not to pay house because for example they do not want, the courts take years to solve the problem”. 

And, “if we continue to let people in indiscriminately, there will be neither health, nor housing, nor any of the segments of social life that we need, because there is no way to respond to 20% more population in the territory,” he said. 

For Ventura, “the country has reason to be disappointed, disturbed and frustrated by the policies of both the Socialist Housing Party and the PSD of Luís Montenegro since 2024”.