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Portuguese and Spanish trade unions are in contact with a view to staging a possible "Iberian general strike", Unai Sordo, secretary-general of CCOO (Comisiones Obreras), said on Thursday in an interview on the programme "Los Desayunos" (source in Portuguese) broadcast by Spanish network RTVE and the EFE news agency.
According to the Spanish union leader, Portuguese unions are considering calling a general strike for 11 November. A similar stoppage has already been scheduled in the neighbouring country for that date, bringing together, among others, Spain's two main trade unions, CCOO and UGT (General Workers' Union).
The idea is to turn this into an "Iberian general strike", Sordo explained. However, he stressed that this will depend on the decision taken by trade union organisations in Portugal. "It is the Portuguese who have to decide whether, in the end, we join forces in a mobilisation across the Iberian Peninsula which would also be historic," said the CCOO secretary-general.
In a light-hearted remark, he also referred to the only Portuguese writer to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, José Saramago, who, besides having spent almost two decades of his life in Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands, maintained a close bond with the progressive movements of his time. "If they go ahead with it [the strike] in Portugal, we are going to call it the Saramago strike," Unai Sordo concluded.
The 11 November general strike in Spain had already been a certainty for several weeks, having been scheduled for 18 days before the snap elections called by prime minister Pedro Sánchez after parliament rejected measures proposed by the national government to tackle the housing crisis.
Both countries have, in fact, seen various initiatives in defence of this right and against the rising cost of living. Taking inspiration from the mobilisations that began, in late September, in Puerta del Sol, one of the most famous squares in the Spanish capital, Madrid, thousands of demonstrators have organised, over several nights, camps in the centres of cities such as Porto and Lisbon, in Portugal.
In both cases, the demands are the same: protesters are calling for decent housing at affordable prices, with many saying that having a job is no longer enough to be able to rent a flat in major urban centres.