Portugal Premier Gets Backing From Opposition in Parliament Vote

Portuguese Prime Minister Luis Montenegro's minority government got backing from the two biggest opposition parties in a vote in parliament after his center-right coalition won a snap election in May.
A motion presented by the Communists to reject the recently reelected government's program was defeated on Wednesday as groups including far-right party Chega and the Socialists voted against the proposal, as previously announced. Jose Pedro Aguiar Branco, the president of parliament, announced the results of the vote.

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Yahoo

7 hours ago

• Yahoo

‘It's inhumane': The airports making passengers queue for up to five hours

Will you be thanking Sir Keir Starmer this summer? The beleaguered prime minister has made much of his diplomatic deal with EU bureaucrats to allow British travellers to use e-gates when travelling to the Continent, thus avoiding unnecessary queues when heading off on holiday. While it's true that some of the more doom-laden predictions of travel chaos after Brexit haven't come to pass, regular travellers can attest to the fact that winding passport queues aren't exactly unknown at European airports. Just look at the recent scenes in Portugal, where British travellers have been left waiting in line for up to three hours in order to show their documents. Faced with a backlash from frustrated travellers, Portuguese authorities have been quick to blame the situation on temporary problems with their security systems. Though Algarve regulars may have noticed that the situation in Faro seems to be a carbon copy of what happened last year, when some travellers reported that only a handful of passport booths were open. So does Portugal bag the dubious honour of having Europe's worst airports when it comes to passport queues? The data on delays isn't fully comprehensive, but there are indicators that suggest that the Iberian nation has some stiff competition on that particular front. A special mention here must go to Brussels Airport, which surely has to take the prize for queuing time – with reports of a staggering five-hour slog earlier this year. 'After a long flight, it's inhumane to expect us to stand for that long,' one frustrated passenger told the Brussels Times earlier this year, in what may have been a deliberate appeal to the EU capital's tradition of protecting human rights. It's true that, as with other European airports, the long lines aren't a permanent feature. But grumbles on social media suggest that they are occurring often enough to cause serious headaches. This has led Belgium's interior minister – the equivalent of their home secretary – to demand that federal police come up with a plan for reducing the queues and restoring sanity. How did things get so bad in the first place? Despite welcoming some 24 million passengers per year, Brussels doesn't even rank among the Premier League of busiest European airports when it comes to passenger numbers. But the city's status as the EU capital, and its historic colonial links, means that it receives a disproportionate amount of flights from outside of the continent, many of which require longer visa checks. That's clearly bad news for British travellers who, at present, have to stand in the same line as those arriving from the likes of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon and Burundi, all of which have regular flights to the Belgian capital with Brussels Airlines. For an insight into how regularly things can go wrong when it comes to passport queues, just look at Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris. The granddaddy of European airports might not have it worse than other major hubs on the continent, but it does publish detailed briefings on waiting times and delays. When you look at the most recent incident reports, you can see that the most common cause of passport delays is the most predictable one: a shortage of border guards. Combine that with heavy traffic during busy periods like school holidays and it's not uncommon to see two or three days per month where waiting times spike to around an hour. The data also shows how major sporting events contribute to airport chaos. Last summer, there were queues of up to 80 minutes during the days before the Paris Olympics, as the airport was forced to divert resources to service the arriving VIP delegations. During the 2023 Rugby World Cup, passengers queued until 1am – more than one hour after the last flight of the evening. When you speak to frequent flyers, you'll find that most have their own candidate for the tardiest airport for passport control. 'Madrid is one airport where I've experienced delays,' says Rob Burgess, editor of loyalty point bible Head for Points. Like Brussels, the airport receives a lot of traffic from outside of Europe, with a barrage of direct flights from Central and South America. 'Unfortunately, a lot of the biggest queues correlate to those destinations where large volumes of British holidaymakers go,' says John Strickland, aviation expert and founder of JLS Consulting. 'Right now, Portugal and Spain seem to be particularly bad for long and slow-moving queues.' That's certainly the case in ever-popular Tenerife, where this year's holiday season kicked off with the now familiar tradition of hefty passport queues at the airport. Back in May, there were reports of British passengers waiting for up to two hours in the sweltering heat as families jostled for bottles of water to keep them cool. In response, Spanish authorities have pledged to increase the number of border guards so they can process travellers more quickly. With the school holidays just around the corner, we should see if the plan has worked. In the meantime, will Sir Keir's e-gates deal come riding to the rescue? Not quite. For all the fanfare around the announcement, ministers have confirmed that the current arrangements will not change until later this autumn, when the EU is finally set to unveil its long-awaited digital border system (known as the EES, or Entry Exit System). Even then, it will depend on the discretion of individual countries whether British nationals will qualify for the e-gates. And that's assuming that the system doesn't succumb to technological gremlins on the particular day you arrive. Passengers who arrived at Heathrow or Gatwick on May 7 last year saw the chaos that can unfold when the e-gate system is hit by a technical outage. Until then, hopeful travellers can look on the bright side: data from Paris and elsewhere suggests that 90 per cent of travellers will breeze through the passport gates in less than 15 minutes. Even those smaller airports in the Canary Islands can manage the traffic the vast majority of the time. But for the minority who end up drawing the short straw this summer, it could prove to be a very testing start to their holiday. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.

Washington Post

14 hours ago

• Washington Post

As Trump shuts out migrants, Spain opens its doors and fuels economic growth

MADRID — When night falls on the other side of the Atlantic, her 32-year-old cousin, a house cleaner in New York, huddles inside a dim basement apartment, terrified of ICE raids. But in a burgeoning quarter of the Spanish capital, where immigrant-staffed restaurants tempt newcomers with Dominican chicharrones and Venezuelan empanadas, Edith Chimbo sat in the sunlight, musing about the Spanish Dream. 'My cousin told me, 'Go to Spain'' said Chimbo, 22, who landed in Madrid earlier this year from the Ecuadorian highlands. Armed with a college degree but no work permit, she's cleaning houses under the table, just like her cousin in the United States. Yet she is counting on something in the weeks ahead that her kin almost certainly cannot: legalization. 'Here,' she said, 'we have hope.' As the Trump administration's crackdown on immigrants and asylum seekers brings tear gas, protests and raids to the streets of the United States, Spain is positioning itself as a counterpoint: a new land of opportunity. In this nation of 48 million with long colonial links to the New World, an influx of predominantly Latin American immigrants is helping fuel one of the fastest-growing economies in Europe. The Spanish economic transformation is unfolding as the center-left government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has streamlined immigration rules while offering legal status to roughly 700,000 irregular migrants since 2021. A landmark bill now being negotiated in the Congress of Deputies could grant legal amnesty to hundreds of thousands more — most of them Spanish-speakers from predominantly Catholic countries in Latin America. Those newcomers often enjoy visa-free travel to Spain, even as Madrid controversially works with Morocco, Mauritania and other countries to block irregular arrivals from the African coast, though Sánchez has also called for tolerance toward migrants fleeing poverty and violence in Africa. Spain's approach is attracting at least some migrants rejected or barred from the United States, including Venezuelans who are now subject to President Donald Trump's travel ban. The number of Venezuelans applying for humanitarian protection in Spain surged to 36,923 between January and May, a 36.4 percent spike from the same period last year. With no visa requirements, all Venezuelans need is a valid passport and a plane ticket. In May, the most recent period available, applicants enjoyed a 98.6 percent acceptance rate. 'My hopes and plans for the United States ended overnight,' said Alexander Salazar, 34, a Venezuelan living in Peru who found out in February that his U.S. visa, on humanitarian grounds as an LGBTQ+ migrant, had been suspended. His plan now is to join other family and friends who have already left for Spain. 'That's where my road leads,' he said by telephone from Lima. Sira Rego, a minister in Sánchez's government, said she was glad to see immigrants choosing Spain. 'It makes me feel a certain pride because it represents the kind of country we want to build: a welcoming country with rights.' Sánchez now finds his party embroiled in a political corruption scandal that has sparked calls for new elections. Still, Spanish lawmakers across the political spectrum have adopted a less demonizing approach toward immigration — at least from some countries — than many of their American and European counterparts. Even the far-right Vox party has appeared moderately welcoming of some Spanish-speaking, culturally similar immigrants from Latin America. Spain, which like most European countries has an aging population, for decades was more a source of outward emigration than a destination for immigrants. It first emerged as a tempting target for foreign job seekers during its economic boom in 2000s. More recently, it has experienced a historic post-pandemic surge, with 2.67 million people born outside the European Union arriving between 2021 and 2023 — an 85 percent increase compared with the previous three year period. Many of its immigrants, particularly from Latin America, arrive legally, either with work or student permits or as tourists, and later seek to change their status. Yet the country still harbors a hidden mass of migrants without legal permission to work. The government has no official figure of how many could be legalized under the new bill, but estimates suggest anywhere from 600,000 to 1 million. Critics point to Spain's unemployment rate — over 10 percent, the highest in the European Union, though less than half what it was a decade ago — as evidence that welcoming migrants is wrongheaded. They argue it suppresses wage growth, increases competition for Spanish workers and threatens Spanish identity. Some opinion polls also show a hardening public stance on migration. Yet the legislative amnesty push came not from a government plan but a grassroots effort backed by civil actors including small-town mayors, companies, migrant advocates and the Catholic church. Spain also has a history of normalizing irregular migrants who can prove steady work, with the last large-scale amnesty under the center-left government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in 2005. Should Sánchez survive the corruption crisis — and Spain's economy continue to thrive — his policies could set up this nation as the antithesis of Trump's America: a migrant-friendly progressive paradise. Under Sánchez, Spain has leaned in as few other nations to diversity, equity and inclusion. A new government rule effective May 1 compels companies with more than 50 employees to enact antidiscrimination policies protecting LGBTQ+ workers. The government is also forging a close economic relationship with Beijing, generating large-scale investment including Chinese auto giant Chery's first factory in Europe. No policy has been as transformative to Spanish society as the stance on immigration, which officials and economists say is helping to reverse population decline and boost social welfare funding at a moment when baby boomers are retiring. Immigration is also helping drive the strongest period of economic growth since Spain's construction boom in the mid-2000s. Between 2022 and 2024, average GDP per capita increased 2.9 percent — the strongest of the E.U.'s four largest economies. A report published this year by the Bank of Spain estimates that up to 25 percent of that growth was linked to the influx of foreign workers paying taxes, filling jobs, renting homes and purchasing goods and services. 'Spain is a complete anomaly, a country where the government is easing the arrival of migrants, and migrants have been absolutely existential to the dynamism of the economy,' said Gonzalo Fanjul, co-founder at porCausa Foundation, a research group on migrant issues. Experts and officials say the arrival of large numbers of Latin American immigrants, who speak Spanish and are overwhelmingly Catholic, has led to fewer societal divisions over assimilation than in countries like Sweden or Germany, which have experienced a large influx of Muslims. 'I really doubt that there is any other country in the world where migration is playing as much a role in economic growth right now as it is in Spain,' said Juan Cerruti, an Argentine émigré to Spain and now the global chief economist at Madrid-based Banco Santander. Immigrants are filling labor gaps not only in Spain's lower-wage tourism, construction and agricultural sectors, but also in the more highly skilled tech and medical sectors. In an office park on the edge of Valencia, companies such as Avantio, a digital services and software provider for the tourism industry, have leveraged Spain's streamlined immigration rules to employ foreigners and grow business. Company officials say they have turned to foreign labor for positions that otherwise might take up to a year to fill. Almost 73 percent of the company's hires in 2024 were born outside Spain, mostly in Latin America. 'We hire people from outside because we need them, we don't differentiate' based on where they are from, said Rebeca Jorge, Avantio's director of human resources. Spain has also changed its rules to help legalize the status of migrants with proof of long-term work, to ease access to work visas for new immigrants, to loosen work restrictions on student visa-holders and to simplify family reunification rules. Those simplified rules could aide Chimbo, whose mother immigrated from Ecuador to Spain a decade ago and became a citizen. Chimbo arrived on a three-month visa in April and is now applying for long-term legal status and the right to work through family reunification. She said she is confident that if that fails, the amnesty legislation could aid her. Before arriving, she considered following her cousin to the United States — a path Chimbo's father tried before being detained and deported from Texas last year. Speaking on a video phone from her dark basement apartment in a New York City suburb, her cousin Cristina said she warned Chimbo away from the United States. 'I'm afraid all the time now … whenever I'm outside, taking the bus to work … I'm afraid,' said Cristina, who is trying to apply for asylum but frets about her chances. 'I've seen the videos. I've seen what they're doing to migrants in the U.S.,' Chimbo said. 'Here, my biggest fear is Mondays, when I have to go to work.' Two hundred and twenty-five miles east of Madrid, in the orange blossom-tinged air of Valencia, men from Colombia, Ecuador, Morocco, Senegal and a host of other countries labored on crews rebuilding infrastructure and erecting new apartments following the devastating floods that hit the region in October. This year, Spain offered legal status to more than 22,000 irregular migrants in the affected area — helping populate an army of construction workers and filling other key jobs in the rebuilding effort. It was a decision driven by humanitarian concern for migrants unable to access government aid following the disaster. But it was also driven by pragmatism. 'I asked the Spanish government for this,' said José Vicente Morata, president of the Valencia Chamber of Commerce. 'We needed these people to have an identification number, the number to be able to exist in Spain. There was a bottleneck in the procedures, [and] we needed workers.' The region has now evolved into a mini-test case of Spain's legalization efforts. After the floods, Gerardo López Mateu, mayor of the nearby village of Real, struggled to find workers willing to work in the town's ongoing cleanup effort. He had four positions open — three of them now filled by migrants. 'We still can't fill the fourth job,' he said. There are some jobs that 'Spaniards just don't want to do.' One of his workers is Ibra Bayane, a 24-year-old Senegalese who arrived in Spain by sea in 2021, living ever since off the precariously shadow economy. He'd pick oranges or deliver food. At best, he said, he'd earn the equivalent of $35 a day. As a documented migrant, he has been able to get a driver's license for the first time and access basic medical care. Now, he can also travel back to Senegal to visit family without risk. His salary is no fortune — 60 euros a day — about $70 — for cleanup work in the hot southern Spanish sun. But it's twice what he was earning before — and enough to afford a small room with a vase of fresh flowers on a desk, and a large window that brings a cooling breeze. 'My life is better now,' he said. 'I can live.' José Bautista contributed to this report.

Bloomberg

16 hours ago

• Bloomberg

Romania Government Talks Hit Roadblock Over Fiscal Measures

Romanian leaders hit a last-minute snag in talks to form a new government as negotiators deadlocked over how to narrow the Balkan nation's budget deficit. The currency fell. President Nicusor Dan had been expected to designated a prime minister on Friday. But the new head of state is putting that off until he secures a deal between pro-European parties on a fiscal plan, according to people familiar with the talks who asked not to be named as they take place behind closed doors.