Portugal’s bid to attract foreign money backfires as rental market goes ‘crazy’

Our prices for a one bedroom apartment, depending on location, can also go that high, but I think you might be conflating what "a bedroom" means here. It's 500€ for a bedroom in an apartment, not the whole one bedroom apartment.

Thanks for letting me know that things can always get worse. lol

In Portugal, we receive 14 months of salary. The normal 12 months and 1 month salary as vacation subsidy, and another as Christmas subsidy.

First, please don't mix "digital nomads" with the rest: they're a tiny number (in total, ever, adding up to maybe less that 6 months of degree-holder emigration from Portugal) and, worst, produce all the wealth from their work abroad and pay 1/4 the tax of the locals, so each of them isn't economically worth a single local highschool dropout, much less the economic value of the kind of degree holders leaving the country.

The "rest" are even more interesting: basically Portugal is importing people way less qualified that the average portuguese of working age (worse so versus those leaving) and it's being very overtly done to put pressure on salaries in areas like Tourism (which is basically the chosen "silver bullet" to go around all the problems in the Portuguese Economy: I refer you back to my point about just ridiculously bad portuguese management and political culture is) as well as to supposedly make up for the "population aging" (the very thing that was caused and is being made way worse by both low salaries and the policies to inflate house prices).

Pushing out well trained people capable of working in high-value industries and bringing in people with mainly primary school education or less isn't a strategy for improving the country (or in fact "strategical" in any sense of the word, unless there's some kind of strategy to empoverish the country).

Open door immigration is 100% to help politically well-connected Tourism Industry fatcats find workers for their companies whilst paying shit salaries (it's funny how they go on TV saying that they "can't find people to work and need more immigration" whilst refusing to, you know, pay better to attract the workers they need) and exploitative Agro operations growing produce for export who want to pay de facto per-hour even less that the ridiculously low portuguese minimum wage, to try to plug the very problem of "too many old people not enough workers to pay their pensions" that's being caused by continuous political choices to pump up house price inflation for personal profit of those very same politicians and their mates and to increase sheer human numbers for those politically connected companies which are in an economic position to take a cut of the entire GDP of the country (almost invariably holding monopoly or cartel positions due to political decisions) and who couldn't care less if GDP falls per-capita as long as the total number goes up.

The problem is not immigration per-se, it's how it's being done and why (especially if we follow the chain back to the "why of the why of the why" as it ultimatelly boils down to making certain politicians and their mates very rich by sacrificing the future of the country and everybody born in it).

Shit, the only good big thing in present day Portugal which is not being destroyed (even the investment in people in the form of Education, maybe the only intelligent growth strategy in this country, ever, is being corroded and destroyed) is the right to an EU Passport of everybody born here.

First, I disagree that a government which constantly harps about doing what's good for business, unconditionally I might add (not "good for business which are good for people", just good for any businesses), cuts down on Education and Healthcare citing lack of money whilst refusing to, for example, enforce the legislation on the taxing some asset (dams) sales by the private energy company of the country (which, by the way, was public, sold for a song and is riddled with politicians from the 2 main parties) and which has just saved a private airline with €3 billion of taxpayer's money with the full intention of privatising it next year, is left of center.

Whatever leftwingery they had back in the 80s has long left the stage and policywise they're now doing and defending what the mainstream rightwing party used to: less taxing of companies, less public spending and privatisations, only they added elements like the whole saving of private companies with public money to sell them back to the private (almost certainly for less than the public money put in them) ASAP or the selective closing of eyes to tax evasion (not avoidance, evasion: the illegal kind) as long as it was done by well connected companies, which in the old days not even the mainstream Right did.

Both parties of the power duopoly in Portugal do the same because as individuals their members and leadership are the same kind of people, as plenty of court cases have demonstrated and in fact, the supposed "leftwing" one seems to be the worst one, at least at government levels (though for the other one, all you have to remember is how in Germany a German Company was convicted for corrupting the Portuguese Government for a submarine sale, whilst in Portugal ... *crickets*).

We are in the shithole we are because the people in the 2 parties which have had a near duopoly of power in the country since 74 have massivelly gained from the actions that put us in this, all the while blaming the "other side" as if de facto their policies differed when it came to manage the country for their own personal upside maximization and screw the rest.

They play politics like a one-two play in football, passing the ball back and forth whilst advancing to score against everybody else, members of the same team, and only those who look at nothing else but the ball go around blaming one side, then the other, then the first side, then the other and so on.