This Friday, the PSD considered the rise in inflation “a drama” that mainly affects low-income Portuguese and the middle class and accused the Government of not having the courage to take on the difficulties, unlike Mário Soares.
Duarte Pacheco reacted this Friday, in Parliament, to the data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE) that indicate that the interannual variation rate of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased to 10.2% in October, compared to 9.28% in September, reaching the maximum since May 1992.
“We haven’t seen anything like this for twenty years and the Government, the Minister of Finance, recognized in this debate that the State Budgets do not have measures so that not all people lose purchasing power”, critical.
The PSD deputy considered that both public and private sector employees will lose purchasing power, and warned that not even social support is updated at the rate of inflation.
Duarte Pacheco even made a comparison between the current PS government led by António Costa and the central bloc led by Mário Soares, between 1983 and 1985, pointing out that there was “a great finance minister who saved the country from bankruptcy”, referring to Ernani Lopes.
“They gave a 10% increase to civil servants, but the inflation was 29%. In practice, people lost 20% of their salary, it is something similar to what we are experiencing, with one difference: at that time, the government assumed they were in trouble and had to take that action, now the Government does not have the courage to admit that it has difficulties and prefers to say that this is even good for the Portuguese. It’s just throwing sand in people’s eyes.”
According to the quick estimate released by the statistics institute, “based on the information already collected, the interannual variation rate of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) will have increased to 10.2% in October, a higher rate of 0, 9 percentage points (pp) to that observed in the previous month and the highest since May 1992”.
As for the underlying inflation indicator (total index without unprocessed food or energy products), it registered a variation of 7.1% in October (6.9% the previous month), the highest level since January 1994.
The INE estimates that the interannual variation rate of the energy products index stood at 27.6% in October (a rate 5.4 percentage points higher than that of the previous month), while the index referring to food products did not Manufactured products will have presented variation of 18.9% (16.9% in August), the highest rate since June 1990.
In October, compared to the previous month, the change in the CPI was 1.3% (1.2% in September and 0.5% in October 2021), with an estimated average change in the last 12 months of 6.7 % (6.0% in the previous month).
The Portuguese Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (IPCA) registered an interannual variation of 10.7% in October, compared to 9.8% in the previous month.
The definitive data referring to the CPI for the month of October 2022 will be published by the INE on November 11.
Source: Observadora
