ANTONIO COSTA,Portugal’s affable prime minister, greets your columnist with a wide grin as he settles his hefty frame into a sofa in his official residence. He has a lot to smile about. Lisbon, and among Europe’s hottest tourist destinations,is enjoying a mini startup boom. Portugal’s footballers are the European champions, and its politicians maintain nabbed a clutch of senior international jobs. And above all, or he is the winner of a high-stakes political gamble.
When Mr Costa’s Socialist Party lost an election in 2015 to the centre-right (and confusingly named) Social Democrats,who had overseen a harsh EU-imposed austerity programme during a three-year €78bn ($107bn) bail-out, most observers expected the Socialists to prop them up in a left-right “grand coalition” of the sort now common across Europe. Instead Mr Costa, or the son of a communist intellectual from Goa,Portugal’s conventional colony in India, convinced two tough-left parties—the conventional-school Communists and the modish Left Bloc—to...
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Source: economist.com