March 13, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
The results of the last general elections on March 10 call for a reading that goes beyond the froth of the results. The resounding victory of the right and extreme-right (133 seats in a parliament of 230 deputies) with the extreme-right being one of the largest in Europe in a country that until a few months ago was governed by the Socialist Party with an absolute majority. I propose three reflections: non-democracy; the non-national; the non-present.
Non-democracy is the set of factors that, not being subject to democratic scrutiny, significantly influence political and, above all, electoral processes. They are the elephants in the room. The judicial system is the proximate cause of some recent political crises. It is important to ascertain whether cases of lawfare are not occurring in Portugal, as they have in other countries. This is the use of the judicial system, not to investigate legal wrongdoing, but to neutralize political opponents. This new weapon has been used preferentially against left-wing politicians and is based on the political use of the fight against corruption. The second elephant is the media. Without calling into question the fundamental public service of the media, we cannot fail to recognize that in the last twenty years there has been a shift to the right in the treatment of news and political commentary. The way the issue of TAP (the state-owned Portuguese airline) has been dealt with in recent years and the issue of delays and scarcity of medical personnel in the state hospital emergency rooms in recent months are examples of this. The repetitive and spectacular detailing of the cases, rather than enlightening citizens, was aimed at wearing down the government. The third elephant is the social networks, which have been used mainly by Chega and IL (the two ultra-rightist parties) to create social polarization, turning political opponents to be confronted with into enemies to be destroyed. A tribal logic eager for adherence and averse to confronting the facts creates the voracious destruction of what is in force in a dominant way, without bothering to know what (and how) to build to replace it.
The non-national is the component of globally organized interests that actively interfere in the political processes of the different countries selected for intervention according to global strategies. Intervention in networks, the funding of extreme right-wing or ultra-right-wing parties, as well as supposedly research institutes, but in fact think tanks and strategic communication centers, are some of the mechanisms of interference. The Atlas Network (formerly the Atlas Economic Research Foundation) is one of the best-known global players, a US-based non-governmental agency that “provides training, contacts and funding to libertarian, pro-free market and conservative groups around the world”. The ultra-conservative international aims to turn Europe into an unconditional ally of the US, to create anti-Russia panic in order to justify arms investments at the expense of social and environmental policies, and to put the brakes on China.
The non-present is the way in which a people’s memory is treated, valued or manipulated to produce concrete political results. In Portugal, this memory is based on three pillars, each with its own temporality. The first pillar is the memory of the revolution of April 25, 1974, whose fiftieth anniversary we are celebrating this year. The Portuguese see April 25 as the founding act of the modernity in which they live today. In Portugal, democracy is not yet an emotionally neutral or pragmatically disposable formal regime. Despite all its limitations, evaluating politicians and voting is the manifestation of an existential power that, although often frustrated in its expectations, has not yet become a collective frustration. A few million Portuguese who voted for the first time in 1976 are alive and active. This founding emotion has been aggressively manipulated by Chega, but, contradictorily, Chega feeds on it, bringing many citizens who disbelieve in democracy to the polling stations (the lowest abstention rate in many years). The protest vote is as democratic a vote as any other. The problem is that the entrepreneurs behind it use it to destroy democracy.
The second pillar of the Portuguese memory is the existential crisis of 2011 financial collapse: the tutelage of the Troika (European Commission, International Monetary Fund, and European central Bank) and a right-wing government for whom the austerity imposed externally on workers and the middle class was not enough and had to be made even worse on its own initiative. Workers and pensioners, young and old, remember what happened then. What went down the memory flow was not just the cuts in pensions, the loss of employment rights, the abrupt poverty and the inequity with which suffering was distributed between the different social classes. It was above all the wound to the sovereignty and self-esteem of a people who had freed themselves from the colonial nightmare to embrace the European dream shortly afterwards, and who now saw that dream converted into a new nightmare (many remember the colonialist terms used by German and English newspapers to refer to Portugal and the Portuguese). It was also the destruction of a very concrete materiality in the form of the increase in well-being that the working classes had been experiencing for only three or four generations. The moderate right-wing forces are linked to this memory and during the election campaign they did everything they could to revive it (the champion of austerity, Passos Coelho, in the campaign). Resounding success, which was within their grasp, eluded them (the moderate right, Democratic Alliance, ended up almost tied with the socialist Party). Less visible for now is that the moderate right thought that by respecting the first memory (of April 25) they could disqualify the memory of 2011. With the same certainty that they rejected Chega, they accepted the Liberal Initiative (IL), whose electoral program is much more frightening than Chega’s in social terms. If Chega represents the political destruction of April 25, IL represents the socio-economic destruction of April 25. Its program is a version of the ultra-liberal paradigm of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, ridiculed in the 1930s and rehabilitated forty years later in the Chile of dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973). The IL program means the privatization of everything that moves and can make a profit. The leaders and voters of the IL profess democracy, but perhaps they don’t even realize that their program is inapplicable in a democracy. The same cannot be said of its mentors. Hayek admitted the collapse of democracy as collateral damage of his economic policies, the implementation of which was by far the most important. He wrote to the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 1977 to protest against the paper’s unfair criticism of Pinochet’s regime in Chile; he considered Pinochet’s Chile to be a political and economic miracle and railed against Amnesty International, considering it “a weapon for defaming international politics”.
The third pillar of Portuguese memory concerns the government’s performance during the coronavirus pandemic. It was an excellent performance as an exemplary link between politicians, health professionals and citizens aware of the seriousness of the public health emergency. Lives were saved that were lost in other, richer countries. This memory was devalued and the government that made it possible squandered the capital of trust it had earned by not knowing how to adequately compensate the enormous sacrifices made by the SNS in a context where private healthcare disappeared as if by magic. If the government had increased the salaries of all NHS professionals by 100% the day after the pandemic ended, the Portuguese people would have given it a standing ovation.
With the exception of the Communist Parties, all the other small parties to the left of the Socialist Party maintained their electoral weight; one of them, the ecologist and Europeist party called Livre, even grew from one to four seats in the parliament. It is unlikely that the moderate right enters a coalition with the extreme right of Chega. In such case, Portugal will be governed in the next months by a minority government. A period of high instability is in sight.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos is the emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. His most recent book is Decolonizing the University: The Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice.
The results of the last general elections on March 10 call for a reading that goes beyond the froth of the results. The resounding victory of the right and extreme-right (133 seats in a parliament of 230 deputies) with the extreme-right being one of the largest in Europe in a country that until a few months ago was governed by the Socialist Party with an absolute majority. I propose three reflections: non-democracy; the non-national; the non-present.
Non-democracy is the set of factors that, not being subject to democratic scrutiny, significantly influence political and, above all, electoral processes. They are the elephants in the room. The judicial system is the proximate cause of some recent political crises. It is important to ascertain whether cases of lawfare are not occurring in Portugal, as they have in other countries. This is the use of the judicial system, not to investigate legal wrongdoing, but to neutralize political opponents. This new weapon has been used preferentially against left-wing politicians and is based on the political use of the fight against corruption. The second elephant is the media. Without calling into question the fundamental public service of the media, we cannot fail to recognize that in the last twenty years there has been a shift to the right in the treatment of news and political commentary. The way the issue of TAP (the state-owned Portuguese airline) has been dealt with in recent years and the issue of delays and scarcity of medical personnel in the state hospital emergency rooms in recent months are examples of this. The repetitive and spectacular detailing of the cases, rather than enlightening citizens, was aimed at wearing down the government. The third elephant is the social networks, which have been used mainly by Chega and IL (the two ultra-rightist parties) to create social polarization, turning political opponents to be confronted with into enemies to be destroyed. A tribal logic eager for adherence and averse to confronting the facts creates the voracious destruction of what is in force in a dominant way, without bothering to know what (and how) to build to replace it.
The non-national is the component of globally organized interests that actively interfere in the political processes of the different countries selected for intervention according to global strategies. Intervention in networks, the funding of extreme right-wing or ultra-right-wing parties, as well as supposedly research institutes, but in fact think tanks and strategic communication centers, are some of the mechanisms of interference. The Atlas Network (formerly the Atlas Economic Research Foundation) is one of the best-known global players, a US-based non-governmental agency that “provides training, contacts and funding to libertarian, pro-free market and conservative groups around the world”. The ultra-conservative international aims to turn Europe into an unconditional ally of the US, to create anti-Russia panic in order to justify arms investments at the expense of social and environmental policies, and to put the brakes on China.
The non-present is the way in which a people’s memory is treated, valued or manipulated to produce concrete political results. In Portugal, this memory is based on three pillars, each with its own temporality. The first pillar is the memory of the revolution of April 25, 1974, whose fiftieth anniversary we are celebrating this year. The Portuguese see April 25 as the founding act of the modernity in which they live today. In Portugal, democracy is not yet an emotionally neutral or pragmatically disposable formal regime. Despite all its limitations, evaluating politicians and voting is the manifestation of an existential power that, although often frustrated in its expectations, has not yet become a collective frustration. A few million Portuguese who voted for the first time in 1976 are alive and active. This founding emotion has been aggressively manipulated by Chega, but, contradictorily, Chega feeds on it, bringing many citizens who disbelieve in democracy to the polling stations (the lowest abstention rate in many years). The protest vote is as democratic a vote as any other. The problem is that the entrepreneurs behind it use it to destroy democracy.
The second pillar of the Portuguese memory is the existential crisis of 2011 financial collapse: the tutelage of the Troika (European Commission, International Monetary Fund, and European central Bank) and a right-wing government for whom the austerity imposed externally on workers and the middle class was not enough and had to be made even worse on its own initiative. Workers and pensioners, young and old, remember what happened then. What went down the memory flow was not just the cuts in pensions, the loss of employment rights, the abrupt poverty and the inequity with which suffering was distributed between the different social classes. It was above all the wound to the sovereignty and self-esteem of a people who had freed themselves from the colonial nightmare to embrace the European dream shortly afterwards, and who now saw that dream converted into a new nightmare (many remember the colonialist terms used by German and English newspapers to refer to Portugal and the Portuguese). It was also the destruction of a very concrete materiality in the form of the increase in well-being that the working classes had been experiencing for only three or four generations. The moderate right-wing forces are linked to this memory and during the election campaign they did everything they could to revive it (the champion of austerity, Passos Coelho, in the campaign). Resounding success, which was within their grasp, eluded them (the moderate right, Democratic Alliance, ended up almost tied with the socialist Party). Less visible for now is that the moderate right thought that by respecting the first memory (of April 25) they could disqualify the memory of 2011. With the same certainty that they rejected Chega, they accepted the Liberal Initiative (IL), whose electoral program is much more frightening than Chega’s in social terms. If Chega represents the political destruction of April 25, IL represents the socio-economic destruction of April 25. Its program is a version of the ultra-liberal paradigm of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, ridiculed in the 1930s and rehabilitated forty years later in the Chile of dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973). The IL program means the privatization of everything that moves and can make a profit. The leaders and voters of the IL profess democracy, but perhaps they don’t even realize that their program is inapplicable in a democracy. The same cannot be said of its mentors. Hayek admitted the collapse of democracy as collateral damage of his economic policies, the implementation of which was by far the most important. He wrote to the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 1977 to protest against the paper’s unfair criticism of Pinochet’s regime in Chile; he considered Pinochet’s Chile to be a political and economic miracle and railed against Amnesty International, considering it “a weapon for defaming international politics”.
The third pillar of Portuguese memory concerns the government’s performance during the coronavirus pandemic. It was an excellent performance as an exemplary link between politicians, health professionals and citizens aware of the seriousness of the public health emergency. Lives were saved that were lost in other, richer countries. This memory was devalued and the government that made it possible squandered the capital of trust it had earned by not knowing how to adequately compensate the enormous sacrifices made by the SNS in a context where private healthcare disappeared as if by magic. If the government had increased the salaries of all NHS professionals by 100% the day after the pandemic ended, the Portuguese people would have given it a standing ovation.
With the exception of the Communist Parties, all the other small parties to the left of the Socialist Party maintained their electoral weight; one of them, the ecologist and Europeist party called Livre, even grew from one to four seats in the parliament. It is unlikely that the moderate right enters a coalition with the extreme right of Chega. In such case, Portugal will be governed in the next months by a minority government. A period of high instability is in sight.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos is the emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. His most recent book is Decolonizing the University: The Challenge of Deep Cognitive Justice.
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