At the conference on the State Budget for 2026, organized by RFF Advogados, which took place this Monday at the Centro Cultural de Belém, in Lisbon, Manuela Ferreira Leite recalled that “it was possible to reduce the level of debt and the deficit without destroying the highly important and decisive social support sectors such as Education and Health”.
The former PSD leader, who gained a public image of austerity when she was Minister of Education (1993-1995) and began to be compared to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, receiving her epithet “Iron Lady”, explained that “if I were in a situation of debt and had to choose between paying the debt and feeding my children, putting at risk their well-being and physical development and intellectual, I would have no doubts about what I would have to do”, adding that there were other ways to reduce the budget deficit and public debt during the last decade.
“Destroying is easy. Rebuilding is more difficult and takes longer”, he warned. The most recent statistics confirm the reach of these words.
In both sectors, Education and Health, the budgetary consolidation of recent years has left visible marks. Portugal managed to balance the books, but at a high price for the responsiveness and quality of services.
In the report from the Health Regulatory Authority, which Ana Mafalda Inácio informs us about in this edition, relating to the first half of 2025 reveals that almost one million users were on the waiting list for a first hospital appointment, 25.6% more than in the same period of the previous year.
More than half (56.6%) of these users wait longer than allowed by law. In the most sensitive specialties, such as oncology and cardiology, the situation is even more serious: 71% of oncology patients and 83.7% of cardiac patients are outside the maximum regulatory times.
Public hospitals increased activity — they carried out 681 thousand first consultations and 305 thousand scheduled surgeries in the first six months of the year — but the growth in demand is greater than the capacity to respond.
As the president of the Portuguese Association of Hospital Administrators, Xavier Barreto, explains, “the demand for care is increasing and the SNS is not being able to keep up with this demand”.
The same person in charge recalls that only 25% of consultations are first consultations and that many situations could be monitored by other health professionals or through technology, freeing up medical time for the initial diagnosis.
ERS data also shows that activity in private and social hospitals with protocols with the SNS represents only a small fraction of the global response, and that even with the creation of the new National System for Access to Consultation and Surgery (SINACC), which should simplify the management of lists, the structural problem persists: there are more patients, more longevity and more chronic diseases, but investment and reorganization of the system are progressing slowly.
In education, the recently released OECD Education at a Glance 2025 report shows that 46% of Portuguese people between the ages of 25 and 64 have difficulty understanding texts that go beyond the basics. They are adults capable of reading simple instructions, but have difficulty interpreting longer texts or analyzing complex information.
Only 3% of respondents reach the highest levels of literacy, compared to 12% on the OECD average. Portugal is, therefore, in penultimate place among 30 countries evaluated, ahead only of Chile.
These figures reflect the prolonged effect of underinvestment in schools, training and qualifications. Since the troika period, the country has maintained its financial effort in education practically stable, at around 5% of GDP, without recovering the relative delay in spending per student or in renewing the teaching staff.
The latest available data indicates that more than half of secondary school teachers are aged 50 or over. There is an evident lack of rejuvenation in schools and a system that increasingly depends on professionals close to retirement and has difficulty attracting new staff.
Prolonged disinvestment in education is not just reflected in schools or salaries. It manifests itself in the population’s skills, its capacity for innovation, productivity and even social cohesion. A society with low levels of literacy is more vulnerable to misinformation, has more difficulty accessing opportunities and progresses more slowly.
These are objective data that illustrate the impact of a prolonged policy of containment on public investment and help to frame the words of the former minister.
A country that does not invest in its teachers, its students and its schools is, in practice, giving up on growth. We are a country that reads less, understands less and, therefore, participates less. And that’s what should worry us most.
In the case of health, we are talking about lives. The SNS is a fundamental pillar for social cohesion. Not investing in health professionals, infrastructure and response capacity is, in practice, giving up on protecting those who need it most and accepting that inequality becomes part of the system. It’s forgetting that a country is worth more the more it takes care of its own.
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