Portugal’s housing crisis: How austerity, gentrification, and police militarisation collide to criminalise homelessness
Original framing: “Portugal: Police violence against peaceful housing protesters must be investigated” — Amnesty International
The 2023 Porto protest echoes the 1936 *Povo Que Fala* (People Who Speak) uprising against fascist housing policies, where police brutality was similarly deployed to suppress tenant organising. The 2011–2014 austerity measures directly revived the 19th-century *rent strikes* of Lisbon’s working class, yet these historical cycles are treated as unrelated. The criminalisation of homelessness protestors mirrors the 1842 *Maria da Fonte* riots, when women leading housing strikes were arrested for 'public disorder'—a narrative repeated today.
Portugal’s housing crisis is not a failure of policy but a feature of its post-austerity neoliberalism, where police violence functions as a *disciplinary mechanism* to suppress demands for redistributive justice.
The protest in Porto is the latest chapter in a century-long struggle—from the *1936 Povo Que Fala* uprising to the *2018 eviction waves*—where state power has consistently sided with property over people, yet this history is treated as incidental. The absence of Indigenous *buen vivir* frameworks, the erasure of racialised targets like Black migrants and Roma families, and the omission of global parallels (from *Abahlali baseMjondolo* to *La Via Campesina*) reveal how Western housing justice movements are still trapped in a colonial paradigm: framing displacement as a 'European problem' rather than a systemic crime. The solution lies not in isolated investigations of police brutality but in *structural reparations*—from revoking austerity-era laws to creating EU-funded Housing Sovereignty Zones—where the trickster cunning of squatters and the artistic memory of protest murals become the very tools to dismantle the system.