A no confidence in Portugal’s hard-right government will signify whether voters in the EU can still choose their own government.
By Conn Hallinan
Europe is facing one of the most serious challenges to democracy it has seen in many decades. On Nov. 10, Portuguese MPs
eventually forced minority government to quit over austerity. A surprise
alliance of left wing parties with a mission to “turn the page” on austerity has
ousted Portugal’s center-right government barely 11 days after it took power. Portugal’s minority right-wing government will likely lose a vote of confidence, initiating a series of events that will determine whether voters in the European Union (EU) still have the right to a government of their own choosing.
Image
Attribute: Despite a left majority in the parliament, Portugal’s President
Aníbal Cavaco Silva reappointed the right-wing alliance’s leader, Pedro Coelho,
as prime minister. (Photo: © European Union 2013 — European Parliament / Flickr
Commons)
The crisis was
set off by the Oct. 4 elections that saw the right-wing Forward Portugal
coalition, which has overseen austerity policies that have driven 20 percent of
the population below the poverty line, lose its majority in the parliament to
three parties on the left: the Socialist Party, the Left Bloc, and a
Communist/Green alliance.
Forward
Portugal, an alliance of the Social Democratic Party and the Popular Party,
lost 28 seats in the election, dropping from 135 seats to 107. The left
parties, meanwhile, won over 50 percent of the vote and picked up 25 seats, for
a total of 122. An animal rights party won 1 seat.
The Portuguese
parliament has 230 seats. A majority is 116 seats.
Instead of
asking the left if it could form a government, however, on Oct. 23, Portuguese
president Cavaco Silva—a former prime minister for the Social Democratic
Party—reappointed the right-wing alliance’s leader, Pedro Coelho, as prime
minister.
Silva went
further, however, delivering an incendiary speech in
which he declared that he would never appoint “anti-European forces” to run the
government, and denouncing parties on the left for opposing the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) and the common currency, the Euro.
“It is my
duty, within the constitutional powers, to do everything possible to prevent
false signals being sent to financial institutions, investors and markets,” he
concluded.
The speech has
set off a firestorm in Portugal, one that is reverberating throughout the EU.
It is one thing for the EU and its financial enforcer, the Troika—the European
Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund—to
exert pressure on a country from the outside. It has done exactly that in
Greece. It is quite another to say that a particular political or economic
program is beyond the pale.
Portugal’s
austerity program, originally introduced by the Socialist Party, has impoverished the country and
driven half a million young people to emigrate. Unemployment, while down from
its height of 17 percent, is still at 12 percent, and over 31 percent for
youth. One out of five in the population is below the poverty line of $5,589 a
year, and Portugal has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the
EU. The average household income has fallen 8.9 percent since 2009. Exhausted
by austerity, Portugal’s voters turned against the right-wing government and
turned it into a minority.
In what is an
historic development—one commentator called it a “Berlin Wall moment”—the three
left parties put aside their differences and agreed to form a united front
government.
While all the
left parties opposed austerity—the Socialist Party having finally seen the
light—they differed on many other issues. The Left Bloc and the Communist Green
alliance opposes Portugal’s membership in NATO and wanted the country to get
out of the Eurozone, the group of 19 countries in the 28-member EU that use the
euro.
The euro is a
controversial issue. It has been a boon for Germany, Austria and the
Netherlands, and to the large banks that dominate European finance. But it has
had a generally negative impact on many other countries, particularly those in
the distressed south—Italy, Spain, Greece, and Portugal. Since Ireland is also
in this same situation, the problems are economic, not geographical.
As far as NATO
goes, there are a number of political organizations that argue the old Cold War
alliance should be retired and that NATO does more to raise tensions on the
continent that it does protect its members.
In any case,
opposition to NATO and the euro are hardly opinions that should bar one from
government, but that is exactly what the Portuguese president has done.
He has
received support for his position as well. Joseph Daul, president of the
center-right grouping in the European Parliament, said, “The sacrifices made by
the people of Portugal must not be jeopardized by a government composed of
anti-EU and anti-NATO parties.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said an
anti-austerity government in Portugal would be a “very negative” development.
Some of the
comments have an Alice in Wonderland quality to them. Coelho said, “It’s time to say
loud and clear that the Socialist Party lost the elections…we’re not going to
stand the elections results on their head.” He was joined by the right-wing
Prime Minister of Spain, Mariano Rajoy, who warned, “coalitions of losers want
to join forces to do away with moderate majorities in our societies, to attain
through deals what they didn’t achieve at the ballot box.”
But as the
Socialist Party grouping in the European Parliament pointed out in a statement, “Portuguese voters were
very clear in the last general election with a strong majority (62 percent)
against the austerity policies of the last four years.”
Rajoy, of
course, has his own problems. His right-wing People’s Party will probably lose
its majority to the Socialist Party and the left-wing Podemos Party in Spain’s
upcoming Dec. 20 elections, but it still may be the single largest vote getter.
He wants to stay in power and the Portugal maneuver gives him a strategy for
doing just that.
What clearly
surprised the Portuguese right is that the left could agree to work together.
The Socialist Party has long been at loggerheads with the Communists, who accuse
it of being too much like the right-wing Social Democratic Party. Indeed, the
fact that the Socialists did not win the election outright is in part due to
the fact that voters are still angry with the party for introducing the
austerity policies in the first place.
But the
dramatic gains for the Left Bloc—it is now the third largest in the parliament,
ahead of the Communist/Green alliance—clearly convinced the left that it should
find issues to agree on. After several meetings, the Left Bloc and the Communist/Greens
agreed to temporarily shelve the Euro and NATO issues, and the Socialists
pledged to end austerity.
There are
still major questions to iron out. The Left Bloc and the Communist/Greens want
to challenge Portugal’s staggering debt—they have a solid basis for claiming
that much of it is illegitimate—while the Socialists have been silent on the
subject. Eventually the Euro, NATO, and the debt will be on the table, but such
disagreements are hardly unique to Portugal. There is virtually no government
in Europe without ideological divisions.
In any case,
despite their differences, the left parties are on the same wavelength as the
majority of Portuguese voters: no more austerity.
As predicted in the political circles,If the
Portuguese president refuses to allow the left to form a government and
Portugal Forward is defeated in the Nov. 10 vote, Silva can appoint Coelho to
run a caretaker government and call for new elections. But those won’t be for
eight months. Silva’s presidency runs out in January, and new elections can’t
be held for six months following the appointment of a new president.
The left has
the votes to insure a president compatible with the will of the voters—they
have already overridden the right’s candidate for Speaker of the House and put
their own candidate in—but there will still be six months before the next
election. Eight months is enough time for a right-wing caretaker government and
its backers in the EU and the Troika to do considerable mischief. Greece has
felt the power of the Troika and seen what it can do to undermine opposition to
its policies.
During the
recent Greek crisis, German finance minister Wolfgang Schaueble made it clear
that what Greek voters wanted was irrelevant. Greece would bow to the Troika or
the Troika would strangle the Greek economy, period. In essence, national
governments should restrict themselves to things like what color park benches
should be painted—provided the paint is affordable.
If this “soft
coup” stands, taxes, interest rates, public ownership, investments, and
economic strategies to control inflation and unemployment—long the battleground
for conflicting ideologies—will no longer be issues to be decided
democratically. Unelected bodies, like the Troika, will make those decisions,
in spite of the fact that many of the Troika’s policies—like austerity—are
highly controversial and have an almost unbroken track record of failure.
Democracy is
what is at stake in Portugal, and it is a crisis that cuts to the heart of the European Union experiment.
Do people still have the right to make decisions about policies that have a
profound impact on their lives? Or do they only get to quarrel about the color
of park benches?
About The Author:
Conn Hallinan
is a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus. For more of
Conn Hallinan’s essays visit Dispatches
From the Edge. Meanwhile, his novels about the ancient
Romans can be found at The Middle
Empire Series.
