PORTUGAL: Socialists Gear up for Return to Power in Sunday’s Vote

By Mario Dujisin Reprint | | Print |

Mario Dujisin

LISBON, Sep 29 1995 (IPS) - The platforms of Portugal’s two leading forces, the governing Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the opposition Socialist Party (PS) for Sunday’s legislative elections are so similar it is popularly said that the only difference between the two parties is the final “D”.

Polls, which show a 40 percent positive rating for the PS against 32 percent for the PSD, predict that the socialists will return to power after a decade of government by liberal centre- right Prime Minister Anibal Cavaco e Silva, who has announced that he will retire from politics after Sunday.

Meanwhile, Portugal’s political class is preparing to sweep the technocrats from power in the elections, in which all 230 seats of parliament will be renewed for four years.

It is “politicians” rather than technocrats who dominate the tickets of both the PSD and PS.

The last “politicians” to govern Portugal were former PSD leader Francisco Pinto Balsemao (1980-83) and current president Mario Soares, formerly of the PS, who served as prime minister from 1983 to 1985.

A fervent defender of the all-powerful market, Cavaco e Silva, an economics professor with a Ph.D. from the University of York in England, replaced Pinto Balsemao in the party leadership in 1985, abandoning the social democratic line and pushing the PSD towards the liberal centre-right.

But what has been dubbed “Cavaquismo” in Portugal began to lose hold in 1994.

And while in the 1991 legislative elections, the PSD garnered 50.4 percent of the vote against the PS’ 29.3 percent, that year’s municipal elections ended in a draw with 40 percent of the vote going to each of the country’s two largest parties.

In the face of such results, the prime minister left the presidency of the PSD in the hands of the party’s eternal second- in-command, Fernando Nogueira, in February, announcing his plans to abandon the realm of politics and return to teaching following the elections.

In those elections, after an intense three-week campaign dull in political terms but rich in publicity, Portugal’s 8.9 million voters will have to decide between candidates with differing personalities but similar programmes of government.

Any novelties have come from the two parties that hold a minority in parliament – the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) and the right-wing Popular Party (PP), which hope to break through the 10 percent barrier – as well as from the imaginative campaigns of two tiny groups from the radical left.

The policies of today’s Socialist Party, particularly in economics, have little to do with those followed a decade ago by Soares, an old anti-Fascist fighter and the historical leader of Portuguese socialism.

Concerned with market reactions, the socialists have done their utmost throughout the campaign to dissolve any possible doubts that their Marxist past has been left behind once and for all.

For example, frequent pacifying messages to large national firms and foreign investors have been forthcoming.

Meanwhile, the PS is seeking the popular vote in the name of improved education, better access to healthcare, stepped up crime- fighting and an all-out battle against corruption.

The PSD has wielded similar promises, while leaning on the experience it claims to have demonstrated during a decade in which – it claims – Portugal took great leaps towards becoming one of the European Union’s most developed members at the turn of the century.

And the novelties offered by the communists – PCP – have included the disappearance of the old guard party leadership and tickets headed by 30 to 50 year-old candidates who have heatedly denied accusations that the party is anti-EU.

In order to keep traditional communist voters from deserting to the small left-wing Revolutionary Socialist Party (PSR) and Popular Democratic Union (UDP), PCP General Secretary Carlos Carvalhas mobilised 83-year-old Alvaro Cunhal, the party’s mythical former leader, who toured the country from north to south.

The PP, in the meantime – after having been rejected as too radical by the European Parliament’s conservative group – has come up with a strategy designed to attract the young, aggressive members of the new right as well as elderly Portuguese nostalgic for the country’s dictatorial past.

Attacks on the EU and ultra-nationalist references to the “glorious Portuguese epic achievements” since the arrival of Vasco da Gama in India or Pedro Alvares Cabral in Brazil, as well as praise of the de facto “Estado Novo” (1926-74) led by Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, are the daily spice of the speeches of PP leader Manuel Monteiro.

On Friday, the day all campaign activity ended, a high-level PP leader proposed Adriano Moreira, a minister in Salazar’s de facto military regime, as candidate for next February’s presidential elections.

And besides the four parties that have traditionally been represented in parliament, polls indicate that the PSR or the UDP could each win a seat.

The PSR platform is attractive to the young: the party calls for an end to mandatory military service and offers to be a source of constant parliamentary denunciations of police brutality.

It also criticises “the EU racists,” while splattering city walls with graffiti proclaiming “Viva Portugal mestizo” (Long Live mixed-race Portugal).

The UDP has put forth several black and mulatto candidates, while leaning on the charisma of its leader, retired army Major Mario Tome, one of the most well-known leaders of the Captains’ Movement that overthrew the Salazar dictatorship in 1974, allowing a return to a democratic system of government in Portugal.