Published on •Updated
Thousands of people gathered in Lisbon and Porto on Saturday to protest rising living costs and housing prices.
The protests, which were also planned in Aveiro, Braga, and Funchal, were organised by a platform named “You can’t live like this anymore,” and saw demonstrators chanting about wages and holding signs with messages such as “this salary isn’t enough to live on.”
Others lifted placards bearing slogans such as “I want to move out of my parents’ house before I’m 50.”
One attendee at the Lisbon march, Teresa Fonseca, told the Lusa news agency that she had taken inspiration from similar recent protests in Spain.
“I saw on Instagram that this protest was going to take place, so I came. Enough is enough. This country is getting worse and worse, and now we need to leave our homes and take to the streets to make our voices heard, just as the Spanish did,” she said.
A post from an Instagram account appearing to be linked to the protests that had promoted the demonstrations said people had “been squeezed by rising house prices and the cost of living” for years.
“We spend our lives working and exhausting ourselves just to make our wages last until the end of the month, to cope with rising fuel prices and basic living costs, and to avoid losing our homes,” it said.
“We can’t go on living like this!” it added.
‘Let’s do it like they do in Spain’
Some protesters, like Fonseca, seemed to be seeking to emulate recent events in Spain, where housing protests broke out following the eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal, who later died.
One group in Porto – where around 1,500 demonstrators reportedly turned out – stood next to a sign reading “let’s do it like they do in Spain.”
In Spain, Maricarmen’s case served as a launch pad for further demonstrations against the country’s housing crisis and heaped pressure on Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government.
The Spanish government proposed new emergency housing legislation as pushback mounted, but it failed to pass, prompting Sánchez to call a snap general election for late November.