PORTUGAL: Leftward Ho, Though Market Rules

By Mario Dujisin Reprint | | Print |

Mario Dujisin

LISBON, Jan 15 1996 (IPS) - The triumph of socialist candidate Jorge Sampaio in Sunday’s presidential elections has confirmed for the fourth time in the last two years that Portugal is decidedly moving to the left.

This shift has occurred despite the liberal market reforms which posted signs of progress in one of Europe’s poorest nations — but evidently failed to satisfy all the expectations of voters.

Sampaio obtained 53.8 percent of the votes, defeating the conservative candidate Anibal Cavaco e Silva with 46.1 percent.

The new president, who takes office March 8, will have the difficult job of replacing Mario Soares, who, according to Sampaio himself, “is the most important politician in the history of Portugal this century”.

Jorge Fernando Branco de Sampaio, 56, a lawyer, entered politics early. He was president of the right-wing students at the University of Lisbon, which between 1959 and 1961 was the centre of the first demonstrations against the dictatorship (1926-1974).

After graduating from law school in 1963, Sampaio began to defend political prisoners who were victims of the regimes of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar and later Marcel Caetano, who succeeded the dictator in 1969.

After the Mutiny of the Captains of the Armed Forces Movement (MFA), who in April 1974 deposed Caetano, Sampaio founded the Socialist Left Movement (MES), from which he resigned this year over disagreement with the extreme leftist position taken up by his followers.

In 1975, Sampaio was a member of the government of pro- communist prime minister, Gen. Vasco Goncalves. As Secretary of State for External Cooperation, he was No. 2 man to then Foreign Minister, Ernesto de Melo Antunes, an army major who was leader of “Group of 9”, the so-called “moderate pro-socialist military”.

When the MFA split between the “Goncalvistas”, the Group of 9 and the left-wing of the party led by Major Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho in October 1975, Sampaio left the government and founded the Group for Socialist Intervention (GIS), formed by intellectuals of the independent left attached to Melo Antunes.

In declarations he made at press conferences in the course of the election campaign, however, Sampaio admitted and accepted responsibility for having voted for Saraiva de Carvalho in the 1976 presidential elections because, he said, to vote for the left- wing army major “meant reaffirming the values of the April Revolution”.

On Soares’ invitation, Sampaio joined the Socialist Party (PS) in 1978. The party elected him member of parliament in 1979. Ten years later he was elected its secretary general, becoming the PS leader.

In 1989 Sampaio was elected mayor of Lisbon with the support of the communists, the Greens and the radical left, a post which he kept till last year, when he resigned to stand for the presidency.

Sunday’s vote is interpreted by analysts not only as a clear triumph for the left, but also as a punishment for the policies of the liberal centre-right government followed for the past 10 years (1985-95 by Cavaco e Silva.

Another important factor in Sampaio’s victory was Soares’ extraordinary popularity. In fact, many electors decided not to vote for an ideology, but for the person who best qualified to become Soares’ political heir.

A third factor, noted the commentators, was that certain cultural aspects also contributed to the victory of the former socialist mayor of Lisbon.

The 10 years of “Cavaquism” were dominated by criteria of the liberal market economy, policies which, according to Soares, were dictated “by impersonal technocrats in Brussels”, who relegated to second place the cultural identity of this Euro-Atlantic nation.

The election results mean that in the the space of only two years the centre-right Social Democratic Party (PSD) of Cavaco e Silva, despite its size, has suffered its fourth consecutive defeat. It shared power from 1979 to 1987, then governed alone with absolute majorities from 1987 to 1995.

The PS succeeded in becoming the main party in the country in the 1993 European parliamentary and municipal elections. Then in October 1995, it managed to win the Portuguese legislative election when general secretary, Antonio Guterres, became prime minister.

According to an editorial in the Lisbon morning paper “Diario de Noticias”, the PSD “defeated and weak, will tend to radicalise the opposition, with popular protest demonstrations”.

The most fertile territory for such a policy would be northern Portugal, where Cavaco e Silva defeated Sampaio.

Except for Oporto, the largest city in the north and the country’s industrial capital, where Sampaio emerged the winner, his conservative rival won the other districts, leaving the map of Portugal divided by the River Tajo, where Lisbon and its southern hinterland marks the frontier of leftist dominion.

Foreseeing a potentially explosive situation, both the victory speeches of Sampaio and Cavaco e Silva’s acknowledgement of his defeat appealed for the unity of the Portuguese.