Portugal PM sees voters backing reforms to avoid new crises

LISBON (Reuters) - Portugal's prime minister warned on Wednesday that any reversal of his crisis-fighting reforms could endanger the country's recovery, adding he believed voters will back his course in an Autumn election. Opinion polls show Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho's Social Democrats and their CDS-PP coalition partners are lagging the centre-left Socialist party, which has criticised austerity but is yet to formulate a policy programme for the election. The popular Socialist mayor of Lisbon stepped down on Wednesday to focus on his quest for the premiership. "Any political reversal of implemented structural reforms, of budget consolidation efforts carried out to fight the crisis, will cost Portugal and Portuguese too dearly," Passos Coelho told parliament shortly afterwards. "But I strongly believe that we will follow that path (of reforms) after the elections, because it comes not from the stubbornness of a prime minister ... but from the determination of all Portuguese who do not want to risk crises and future uncertainty." He said a rise in unemployment to just above 14 percent in February after a fall last year did not compromise Portugal's growth prospects, but that the government was working to assess what had driven the jobless rate up and to address the problem. The government expects the economy to grow 1.5 percent this year, accelerating from 0.9 percent in 2014, the first year of expansion after a deep, three-year recession caused by the debt crisis and austerity measures imposed to tackle it. (Reporting by Andrei Khalip; Editing by Catherine Evans)