POLITICS-PORTUGAL: Crisis Damages Durao Barroso’s Image in EU

By Mario de Queiroz Reprint | | Print |

Analysis by Mario de Queiroz

LISBON, Dec 1 2004 (IPS) - By deciding not to comment on the political crisis that has broken out in Portugal, the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Durao Barroso, chose to elude the responsibility he assumed in July when he named Pedro Santana Lopes as his successor at the head of the Portuguese government.

Since Portuguese President Jorge Sampaio decided Tuesday to withdraw his confidence in conservative populist Prime Minister Santana Lopes, that viewpoint has been widely expressed by the country’s leading political analysts, including those who supported Durao Barroso’s performance as prime minister from April 2002 to last July.

Sampaio will meet next week with the Council of State (a high-level advisory body made up of former presidents, former prime ministers, and other prominent personalities) and with the leaders of the parties represented in parliament.

After that, parliament will be dissolved within 10 or 15 days, and early elections will be called, to be held within 55 to 60 days.

The new parliament to emerge from the elections will name the government that will replace the Santana Lopes administration.

The same day he was asked to preside over the European Commission (the EU executive organ) last July, Durao Barroso gave "personal and political guarantees" that the Portuguese government would be in excellent hands – those of Santana Lopes, his deputy in the Social Democratic Party (PSD), which is conservative despite its name.

But according to Costância da Cunha e Sá, a former director of the conservative weekly O Independente and one of Portugal’s most highly-respected analysts, "that did not come to pass, and it is a disgrace that the president of the Commission refuses to assume his responsibility for what he left behind him."

That view, although perhaps expressed in a more moderate tone, is widely shared by Portugal’s most prominent analysts, who have been making an enormous effort on the country’s main TV and radio stations to explain how so many problems, conflicts and public gaffes could have occurred in just four months.

Over the weekend, warnings to Sampaio of the danger of leaving Santana Lopes in his post abounded. They came from former government leaders whose views continue to carry immense weight on both the left and the right, such as former socialist president Mario Soares (1986-1996) and former prime minister Aníbal Cavaco e Silva (1985-1995) of the PSD.

Soares said "something has to be done, because this government is not capable of governing, nor does it have a minimal level of stability, since it is imploding."

For his part, Cavaco e Silva stated that in the current power structure, "incompetent politicians have shoved aside the competent ones."

The catalyst that led to Sampaio’s change of opinion regarding Santana Lopes was the resignation of Henrique Chaves as minister of youth and sports, just four days after he assumed the post.

Until last week, Chaves held the influential position of "minister assistant to the prime minister", and his designation to head the Youth and Sports Ministry amounted to a demotion.

His decision to step down was significant, as it involved the resignation of a prominent politician who was a personal friend of the prime minister, and who only recently emerged from the background onto the front stage, where he had planned to stay.

Relegated to a secondary role, Chaves felt betrayed, and resigned after just four days in his new post, accusing Santana Lopes of "lack of loyalty" and of "failing to tell the truth" on a number of occasions.

His resignation followed a series of conflicts within the PSD itself and within the coalition government, in which the PSD is allied with the ultra-nationalist Party of the Social Democratic Centre (CDS), the political force that is located farthest to the right in the Portuguese political spectrum.

On numerous occasions over the last four months, Finance Minister Antonio Bagao Felix’s claims that the difficult economic situation made it impossible to lower taxes were contradicted by Santana Lopes and his fiery speeches "announcing" the end of the crisis and imminent tax cuts.

Minister of Cities and Housing José Luís Arnaut and Economy Minister Alvaro Barreto waged open warfare from the front pages of the country’s major newspapers.

The same forum was used by Education Minister María do Carmo Seabra, who confessed that if she had known before what she knows today, "I probably wouldn’t have agreed to form part of this government."

Much the same attitude has been adopted by Environment Minister Luís Nobre Guedes and Public Works Minister António Mexia.

For his part, the all-powerful Minister of State and the Presidency Nuno Morais Sarmento engaged in open conflict with the directors of the state-run media over the direct control of the information produced.

In a commentary on the current crisis, the deputy editor of the influential newspaper Diario Económico, Joao Paulo Guerra, recalled that Durao Barroso had named Santana Lopes as his successor in the name of stability.

In fact, however, his designation has led to tremendous instability, a factor "that has marked his entire turbulent political performance."

The 135 days of Santana Lopes’ leadership have been "a succession of ridiculous situations straight out of a comedy," giving rise to the danger that Portugal would cease to be seen as a "serious country" by the rest of the world, and be considered instead as a "circus", Guerra said.

Santana Lopes, a politician known for his skills in communicating with the people, did his best to fully exploit his obvious charisma during the four months that he governed under a hail of criticism, some of it originating from his own PSD colleagues.

At first, he said that these differences of opinion were merely a sign of active democracy within the PSD. Before long, he was declaring himself the victim of persecution by his "older brothers" in the party, until finally, he claimed to be the target of "betrayal".

Throughout these four months, it was pointed out repeatedly that instead of merely falling apart, the government was in fact self-destructing.

Political analysts – whether impartial or biased towards or against the government – all concur on one key point: the executive branch in Portugal has not been brought down by the opposition, but rather, by members of the governing party and Santana Lopes himself.

The prime minister has been unanimously singled out by analysts as the main reason for the country’s instability.

According to Pedro Guerreiro, editor-in-chief of the Jornal de Negocios, this was clearly demonstrated by Santana Lopes’ "lack of direction and strategy."

In an editorial this Wednesday, the editor-in-chief of the Lisbon daily Publico, José Manuel Fernandes, said that back in July, Sampaio "gave Santana Lopes the opportunity to prove that he could measure up to being prime minister, but Santana Lopes has done everything possible to prove him wrong."

According to Fernandes, the prime minister has clearly shown himself to be the cause of the country’s political instability, and Sampaio simply "could not continue holding up a government that is rapidly self-destructing."

But in the opinion of writer and analyst Miguel Sousa Tavares, the person who is mainly responsible for this crisis is Durao Barroso, for having handed the country over to Santana Lopes, "the most incompetent prime minister to govern Portugal in 30 years of democracy."

And this is fatal for the international image of the country that gave the European Commission its new president.