This, he said, is because the country’s economy and public finances are now in order after three years of economic adjustment under a euro-zone bailout and discipline after it.
Passos Coelho made the statement at a campaign rally in Coimbra with his party’s coalition partner in government and in the elections, the right-wing People’s Party, at which he also said that the public sector deficit this year would be below 3% of gross domestic product.
“All this enables us to once more give politics its great dignity,” he said. “So we free ourselves from the financial dictatorship of numbers, free ourselves from the exceptional restrictions on our economy.
“We’ve all, for four years, been talking about finance and economy,” he went on. “And it’s now that the economy and finances are in order that we can once more give full dignity to politics.”
Passos Coelho outlined three political objectives for the next few years: the fight against inequalities in partnership with private social institutions, the rejuvenation of Portuguese society, and the reduction of bureaucracy through a reform of the state. To meet these objectives, he said, the governing coalition needed to “hold our course”.
The Social Democrat leaders comments came a few days after the National Statistics Institute revised the 2014 public sector deficit to 7.2 percent of GDP, from the previous 4.5 percent, after the cancellation of the sale of Novo Banco, the successor institution to collapsed bank Banco Espírito Santo, because the state loan made to the banking sector resolution fund that owns it must now be brought into the state accounts.