POLITICS-PORTUGAL: The Right Returns to Power

By Mario de Queiroz Reprint | | Print |

Mario de Queiroz

LISBON, Mar 18 2002 (IPS) - The right has returned to the government in Portugal, after a six-year absence, winning an absolute majority in parliament in early legislative elections.

But the Socialist Party (PS), which has governed since 1995, was defeated Sunday not by a modern and articulate right, but by the weakness and indecision that characterised the government of Prime Minister Antonio Guterres, according to most analysts.

The right-wing Social Democratic Party (PSD) won 40 percent of the votes in Sunday’s elections, compared to the 38 percent that went to the PS. The PSD will now have to strike an alliance with the nationalist right-wing Social Democratic Centre/Popular Party (CDS/PP) to obtain an absolute majority in Congress.

The PSD, whose head, José Manuel Durao Barroso, will be the next prime minister, garnered 102 of the 230 seats in the single-chamber parliament, while the CDS/PP, headed by Paulo Portas, took 14 seats, after winning 8.75 percent of the votes.

Portas’ campaign platform was based on restrictions on immigration, a strengthening of law enforcement, the mandatory singing by students of the national hymn at the start of the schoolday, and fulfillment of the demands set forth by veterans of Portugal’s colonial wars.

With Portas in the government, the so-called “Portuguese paradise” could turn into hell for the roughly 350,000 immigrant workers in Portugal, most of whom are from former Portuguese colonies in Africa and Brazil, as well as the Ukraine, Moldavia and Romania, say human rights activists.

President Jorge Sampaio will call together the leaders of the parties represented in parliament to set up the new government. Celebrating his victory in the early hours of Monday morning, Durao Barroso said he would present the president with a proposal “entailing a solution that will provide stability for the country.”

Portugal’s political crisis broke out after the PS suffered a resounding defeat in the Dec 17 municipal elections, and all of the country’s large cities were left in the hands of the PSD, leading to the resignation of Prime Minister Guterres, whose second term began in 1999.

But the majority of those who voted for the PSD did not vote in favour of that party, but against the socialists, according to observers.

Guterres opted for neither the right nor the left, according to the Lisbon newspaper Público, because “at times he wanted to be like the progressive (French Prime Minister Lionel) Jospin, and at others (like the British head of government Tony) Blair, the most conservative of the European socialists.”

Durao Barroso, an uncharismatic leader who is not well-versed in the economy, the most sensitive area of government, faced off with the new secretary-general of the PS, economist Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues.

However, both leaders, who share a past of political militancy in extreme left groupings, wholeheartedly embrace the market economy and the globalisation process.

In the 1970s, Durao Barroso was a leader of the Maoist Communist Party of the Workers of Portugal/Revolutionary Movement of the Party of the Proletariat, while Ferro Rodrigues belonged to the Movement of the Socialist Left, which looked down on the party of the future prime minister as “reformist and bourgeois.”

Ferro Rodrigues “achieved the impossible: not being taken as a second Guterres,” said former PSD parliamentary deputy Vasco Pulido Valente, a columnist with Lisbon’s Journal de Noticias. According to observers, he thus lost the elections but consolidated his position as the undisputed head of the socialist party.

“Never has anyone wasted so much political capital in so short a time as Durao Barroso,” wrote Pulido Valente, analysing the outcome of the elections. In December, the right-wing leader’s poll ratings stood 12 percent above those of his socialist contender.

“With one more week of campaign, the PSD would have lost the elections, unless Durao Barroso had kept his mouth shut,” filmmaker José Fonseca e Costa, one of the few leftist figures who backed the PSD, told IPS.

Fonseca e Costa did not vote for the PSD because he agrees with the ideas of the right-wing party, but because he is opposed to the cultural policy of the PS.

The director of the newspaper Público, Jose Manuel Fernandes, said Durao Barroso “had the absolute majority in his hand, and he let it slip away.”

Another key aspect of the new political scenario is the decline of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), one of the most orthodox in the western world, whose share of votes dropped from nine percent in the 1999 elections to seven percent on Sunday.

For its part, the Leftist Bloc, which won the support of voters disillusioned with the system who failed to find an escape valve in the traditional parties, confirmed its representation in parliament, growing from two to three seats.

“The results brought a resurrection, a wedding and a funeral. The resurrection is that of the CDS/PP, which was in a deep coma; the wedding is between Portas and the PSD; and the funeral is that of the PCP,” television commentator Miguel de Sousa Tavares said Monday.