As ChadmanFL pointed out in Friday's DKE Live Digest thread, there are parliamentary elections in Portugal on Sunday, and they should be interesting. At a time when the right is dominant in a firm majority of European countries and Greece's Syriza experiment has turned into humiliation, Spain and Portugal have long seemed like the only places where the left could look forward to electoral success. The governing right-wing coalition of the misleadingly named Social-Democrats (PSD) and the conservative CDS-PP became extremely unpopular as a result of the austerity policies it implemented under pressure from the EU, and for most of the past two and a half years the oppositional Socialists enjoyed double-digit leads over the PSD.
Things have changed, however. The PSD and CDS-PP merged into a common list, Portugal Ahead. The tepid but consistent economic recovery seems to have belatedly been rewarded by the voters with a sudden upswing in the "Portugal Ahead" vote in the polls in just the last week or two. Portugal Ahead is now clearly, well, ahead of the Socialists in the polls. It's polling at about 37-41% to some 31-34% for the Socialists. So could the left miss out on a long-promised, clear victory at the last moment, the way Sweden's left did last year?
Keep reading below the fold!
Not necessarily. As ChadmanFL pointed out, the right's lead in the polls still doesn't necessarily mean it will be able to return to government:
The center-right alliance has pulled into a decent lead [but] probably needs around 42-43% to get to a majority. The other three parties - Socialist Party, Democratic Unitarian Coalition and the Left Bloc are all center-left to left-wing. The most recent seat projections have the center-eight falling short of a majority. Seems the most likely scenario is a coalition between the three left-leaning parties.
A center-left/left coalition government along those lines
should be eventful. On the one hand, you'd have the Socialists, who started the whole austerity program themselves when they were in government until 2011, which made them very unpopular at the time. On the other hand, you'd not just have the Left Bloc, polling at 7-9%, but also the Democratic Unity Coalition (CDU), which should be guaranteed to get about 8-11%. And while it includes some Greens too, the CDU is mostly just a vehicle for the Communist Party.
Unlike its counterparts in many other European countries, the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) is fairly unreconstructed. It doesn't seem as extraordinarily insular and dogmatic as the Greek KKE, but they still proudly wave the hammer and sickle.
Commenting on events in Greece, the Portuguese communists blamed the Greek Syriza government for a "stand marked by hesitations, contradictions, yielding and wavering that led to the new memorandum", which - well - seems entirely correct, but doesn't exactly make them look like amenable coalition partners. (The PCP also "reiterate[d] its solidarity with the communists, the workers and the people of Greece and their struggle against the policy of exploitation, impoverishment and submission to the interests of big business, the European Union and the IMF, and for better living conditions, for the restoration of rights and incomes, for sovereignty and development of their country", because there's nothing communists can do as well as long sentences.)
For the hell of it I looked up what the Portuguese communists had to say about their Socialist rivals in last June's "Statement of the PCP Central Committee Meeting". It wasn't friendly.
The Socialist Party election program, the Central Committee stated, made it clear that it was as "committed to the essential instruments and axes of right-wing policies" as the PSD-CDS government, "placing before the people and the country the prospect of continuing stagnation, impoverishment, dependence and national decline". Again grouping together the Socialists with the incumbent right-wing government, the Central Committee wrote that "the attack on workers' rights is what best identifies the class nature of the right-wing policies of PSD, CDS and PS." The PS and PSD-CDS alike had "legitimized foreign intervention in the country and implemented a foreign and defence policy of subordination to imperialism". Summarizing its case, the Central Committee argued that:
the parties of the right wing policy – PS, PSD and CDS – are preparing in order to perpetuate, with this or another marginal change, the essence of the policy of exploitation, impoverishment and dependency that has led the country to economic decline and social regression. Despite insistent and artificial manoeuvres to attempt to present the electoral programs of PS and PSD/CDS in confrontation, the truth is that the are based on the same premises and orientations that are at the origin of the policy of crushing the incomes and rights of the workers and people imposed by the Growth and Stability Pacts of the PS and the Aggression Pact signed by PS, PSD and CDS-PP with the foreign troika.
As easy as it is to mock the wooden language that's always been typical for the communists, it could be argued that they have a number of good points, e.g about how the kind of EU-sanctioned austerity policies which the current right-wing government and the previous socialist government both imposed led to "more unpaid work time, deregulation, more precariousness, unemployment and cuts in wages, rights and social protection," and an undoing of "labour achievements" going back to the 70s. That takes this too far into policy territory though. Suffice it to say that the Washington Post link further above (here it is again), which puts a pretty positive gloss on the government's economic politics, at least reaches a pretty similar conclusion about how little a PS and a PSD-CDS government would differ from each other.
The point here, however, is just to indicate how awkward a coalition partner the Portuguese communists would make. This is a party which decries the "federalist, neoliberal and militaristic nature" of the EU, and sees NATO exercises as a signal of "the dangers of imperialism’s bellicist offensive in Europe". Which, again, you can agree or disagree with, but doesn't suggest that a broad left-of-center coalition government would have a long life. The PCP's Secretary-General, Jerónimo de Sousa, is also the most popular politician of Portugal, so he wouldn't be easy to co-opt and he's got something to lose.
Now if someone can tell me more about the Left Bloc I'd be grateful. I know about as much as is on its Wikipedia page, but not much more. Is the Left Bloc, in relation to the communists, more or less what Greece's Synaspismos was vs. the KKE? Or are they a paler shade of red, like eg Denmark's Socialist People's Party?
There's yet another left-wing party of (slight) interest too, called Livre. I have a soft spot for it because it was founded by Rui Tavares, a Member of European Parliament who played a very active, substantive role in tackling Hungary's shameful new media laws when those were adopted in 2010. But it's dropped to below 1% in the polls, and will be irrelevant.