Whom says "B", is really saying "A"

So after a relatively tough but not so very long journey of IMF/EU/ECB close guided austerity which has passed the milestone of the severest state budget proposal in recent history in terms of tax collection (and not expense cutting), Portugal's prime minister has now launched the suggestion that the fundamentals of the financial assistance programme should be revised, not be understood as a renegotiation. 

This idea arose on the rather informal occasion of what formally was not an act of government and happened to involve the members of parliament of the two governing political parties, thus exlcuding the 4 or 5 opposition parties.

Mr Passos Coelho is certainly not as new to domestic politics as he is to international institutional shadowed governance and my guess is that he should have a fair idea, by now, of when and what to message in his current position.

On a mere national level, one could argue that this is just another politician starting to have to think of re-election.  From an interantional perspective, I suspect the prime minister's announcement was previewed, pre-authorized and planned by Portugal's foreign creditors, most of which must constantly consider the contagious effects within an Eurozone.

This would imply that the Portuguese government, the political parties which created it, the IMF, the EU and the ECB all have finally come to terms that the austerity package as a combination of sovereign financial aid with structural reforms as it was agreed and implemented in the spring of 2011 will not work or, worse, is seriously threathened with adverse effects.

There's a popular quote which more or less dictates that people, and thus societies and the governments they produce, will cause change either when they realistically want to or when they simply have to and in Portugal's case it has arrived to the latter.

While they will be composing plan B on some serious cuts in state apparatus for submission to creditors, I wonder if Mr Passos Coelho and his political followers are conscient whether in fact they will be surrendering towards the very first intentions of a plan A, carefully kept in a drawer in some foreign desk. 

For sake of the Portuguese population I hope that that desk belongs to someone of good faith and in search of synergies in cross border terms.  I am not so sure that desk houses at institutions like the IMF, the EU or the ECB, however.