EUROPEAN UNION: Iberia’s Socialists Tilt Political Balance Back Towards the Middle

By Mario de Queiroz Reprint | | Print |

Analysis by Mario de Queiroz

LISBON, Feb 21 2005 (IPS) - The socialists’ landslide victory in Portugal’s legislative elections and the substantial increase in the support garnered by the rest of the left indicate that the political balance in the European Union (EU) may be starting to tilt back towards equilibrium and away from conservative domination.

The historic triumph by the Socialist Party (PS) in Sunday’s elections, which gave it an absolute majority in the single-chamber parliament with 121 of 230 seats, was accompanied by the expansion of the Communist legislators from 12 to 14, as well as the spectacular growth of the Left Bloc (made up of former Trotskyists), from two to eight lawmakers.

The outcome of the elections, which surpassed the projections of even the most optimistic leftist analysts, marks an abrupt shift similar to that experienced by Spain on Mar. 14, 2004, when the conservative Popular Party’s candidate Mariano Rajoy was defeated by Socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who replaced José María Aznar as prime minister.

The Portuguese left, which won the support of 60 percent of the electorate, has thus become the strongest political left in the European Union in proportional terms.

Meanwhile, the conservative Social Democratic Party (PSD) and its nationalist right-wing ally, the Social Democratic Centre (CDS), suffered their worst defeat in 22 years.

Sunday’s elections marked a new setback for conservatives in the EU (who are grouped in the European People’s Party) as well as a personal debacle for former Portuguese prime minister José Manuel Durao Barroso, the architect of Portugal’s right-wing coalition in 2002 and the president of the European Commission – the EU executive – since 2004.

The humiliating downfall of the PSD and CDS, whose combined support plunged 14 percent, was not prevented by the unusual front-line participation in the campaign by Durao Barroso, which won him harsh criticism in the European Parliament in Strasbourg and behind the scenes in Brussels, where the European Commission is headquartered.

In the past two years, the conservatives have been pushed out of power in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Spain and, now, Portugal, while everything indicates that Tony Blair will remain in power and defeat his conservative opponents in Britain.

The first international leader to congratulate Portugal’s future prime minister José Sócrates, the secretary-general of the PS, was Spain’s Zapatero, who enthused in a letter that “for the first time in many years, the clocks in Spain and Portugal mark the same time.”

In March 2004, Zapatero’s Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) defeated Aznar’s PP, which governed since 1996.

Like the administration of Durao Barroso, the PP government in Spain staked its bets on throwing its unconditional support behind the U.S.-led attack on Iraq, despite the fact that opinion polls showed that an overwhelming majority of the public was against taking part in the war.

Although Sócrates said the three main priorities of his government’s foreign policy would be “Spain, Spain and Spain”, the socialist leader also said he draws inspiration from Blair, because of “his great contribution to the development of the European left.”

On a number of occasions, Sócrates has stressed the urgent need to restore EU relations with the United States, an emphasis he shares with Blair.

But unlike the British prime minister, Sócrates is critical of Washington’s unilateral military interventions.

The middle road he seeks between the stances taken by the governments in Madrid and London prompted him to hastily refute a U.S. newspaper that predicted that a Portuguese version of Rodríguez Zapatero was about to be elected.

Sócrates himself described the foreign policy that can be expected from his administration: “Portugal will live up to all of its international obligations, but will only participate in military actions undertaken by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) or approved by the United Nations.”

On this issue, the future prime minister of Portugal, who takes office in mid-March, is not in line with Blair, but with Zapatero, who ordered the withdrawal of Spain’s troops from Iraq last year, while authorising the deployment of troops to Afghanistan, which was also attacked by Washington, but is now occupied by a multinational U.N.-mandated force.

Another significant aspect of Portugal’s future foreign relations is the influence that this southern European country could have on some of the new members of the EU, which expanded on May 1, 2004 from 15 to 25 members.

Hungary and the Czech and Slovak republics have frequently pointed to their similarities with Portugal in terms of the size of their territories and populations and their level of development, despite the geographic, linguistic and cultural distances.

In speeches given in Budapest, Prague and Bratislava during visits by authorities from Lisbon, officials noted that the three former socialist nations joined the EU 13 years after nearly half a century of totalitarian government came to an end, similar to the situation Portugal found itself in back in 1986, 12 years after the fall of the “O Estado Novo” authoritarian regime.

“Sócrates and Zapatero do not make a spring” among Europe’s socialist and labour parties, foreign policy analyst Augusto Vilela told IPS.

But “Spain and Portugal could very well mark the start of a more pragmatic and modern dynamics, in an EU that is overly permeable to the influence of the neo-cons in the United States,” he added.