Portugal: Government evacuates residential protest camps

Unlike the Spanish left-wing coalition, the conservative Portuguese government under Luís Montenegro is taking tough action against housing protests. The protest camps in Lisbon and Porto were evacuated on Sunday night. According to official information, there were 31 arrests - 25 in Lisbon and 6 in Porto - and eleven injuries, including three police officers.

According to police, the arrests were made for disobedience. The organizers of the protests speak of 37 injured demonstrators, most of them in Lisbon, and accuse the police of excessive force. In total, police cleared and confiscated 117 tents in Lisbon and 51 in Porto.

It was the second evacuation in the two largest cities in the southwestern European country. The decision to put up the tents again was made in both cities during popular meetings, which were preceded by renewed mass demonstrations on Saturday. The authorities had already declared in advance that they would not tolerate any new protest camps.

The police used particularly violent measures to evacuate a first tent camp in Porto in the early morning of October 15th. At least 40 people were injured, two of them seriously. In Lisbon, the police cleared the area last Tuesday. 55 people were arrested and 228 tents were removed.

Similar to neighboring Spain, Portugal is all about affordable housing. Rents here have risen even more sharply in the last decade than in Spain: according to official figures, they rose by 124 percent within ten years - around twice as much as the EU average.