“The country needs a new direction,” Jose Manuel Durao Barroso said in the run-up to his election as the country’s prime minister last year. “We have to work more; we have to regain our competitiveness abroad,” he added.
Barroso was to take power at a defining moment in Portugal’s history: for in 2006, 20 years after Portugal first joined the European Union (EU), the country will face the possible loss of £2.2bn in annual income from the EU’s Cohesion Fund. The new Government had little more than three years to knock the country’s sluggish economy into the kind of shape to ride out the storm.
