Portuguese police dismantled a protest camp in Lisbon's Rossio Square shortly after 2am on Sunday, deploying dozens of officers with dogs and batons against demonstrators who had pitched more than 100 tents hours earlier. Twenty-five people were arrested and later released; they face court on Monday. A smaller camp of about 50 tents in Porto's Praça D. João I was cleared simultaneously, with six arrests there. Police described the operation as "proportionate." The activist group Casa para Viver disputes that characterization sharply, reporting 60 injuries versus the police's count of seven, and has called a fresh protest outside parliament on Tuesday. The camps followed a march by thousands along one of Lisbon's main avenues on Saturday, driven by numbers that explain the fury: Portuguese home prices have more than doubled since 2017, rents for new leases have nearly doubled, and the Bank of Portugal estimates a nationwide shortfall of 300,000 homes — equivalent to Lisbon's entire housing stock. Young people bear a disproportionate share of the squeeze. The protesters' demands are specific. They want the government to scrap a bill that would make evictions easier and to end rent caps on new leases. That bill has already passed a first parliamentary reading, though the far-right Chega party abstained — a notable fence-sit from a party that typically feeds on exactly this kind of economic discontent. The government's decision to deploy force rather than engage with demands is a textbook example of treating a structural crisis as a public-order problem. A 300,000-home deficit is not a campsite; it is a failure of supply policy accumulated over years of under-building, tourism-driven speculation, and golden visa programs that turned Lisbon and Porto into investment vehicles for foreign capital. Baton charges do not build apartments. Portugal's crisis mirrors Spain's, where similar protests over rents and housing shortages have erupted. Paris has seen student demonstrations broaden into wider economic protests. The pattern across southern and western Europe is consistent: housing costs outpacing wages, supply lagging demand, and governments reaching for the truncheon before the blueprint. Chega's abstention on the eviction bill is the political tell. The far right sees more upside in letting the crisis fester than in taking a legislative position — discontent is their fuel, not their problem to solve. If mainstream parties continue to respond with riot police and pro-landlord legislation while a generation watches homeownership recede, they are building Chega's voter base for free. The next 48 hours matter. Tuesday's parliament protest will test whether the crackdown radicalized the movement or suppressed it. If turnout grows, the government faces a choice between escalation and engagement — and every European capital watching has the same arithmetic on its desk.
