Portugal - failing to stay the course Talk about unfriending. Portugal's prime minister, Pedro Passos Coelho, whinged on Facebook recently about what an awful job he had announcing nothing but cuts, cuts, cuts. Some 99,000 messages - most of them hostile - later, he must be regretting it. The reaction, coupled with furious trade union opposition to a move to cut employers" social security contributions, shows how polarised Portugal has become while attention has been focused on Spain. That is worrying. Oddly, Portugal's indicators seem to suggest everything is OK. Yields on its 10-year, five-year and two-year bonds are well below their 2012 highs. But a closer look suggests that the country increasingly combines some of the worst aspects of Greece and Ireland - a tendency to miss targets agreed with its lenders and a bombed-out banking sector. The budget deficit targets for 2012 and 2013 have been revised upwards to 5 per cent and 4.5 per cent, while the International Monetary Fund estimates that the economy will shrink 3 per cent this year and 1 per cent next. Credit remains tight, too. Portugal's financial and economic plight has crippled the stock market. The PSI20 index has underperformed the wider European market by a fifth this year; nearly 70 per cent of its €15bn market capitalisation is now accounted for by four companies - the energy groups EdP and Galp, Portugal Telecom and Jerónimo Martins, a food distributor that earns two-thirds of its revenue in Poland. Banks" values have plummeted to Irish levels - shares of Banco Comercial Portugues are trading at under €0.10, for example. The decision to scrap the social security change shows how timid the government has become in the face of public pressure. Portugal's bailout always contained too much Europe and not enough IMF. The fund needs to keep Lisbon on course to avoid it becoming another Greece.