Portugal has entered dangerous political waters. For the first time since the creation of Europe’s monetary union, a member state has taken the explicit step of forbidding eurosceptic parties from taking office on the grounds of national interest.
Anibal Cavaco Silva, Portugal’s constitutional president, has refused to appoint a Left-wing coalition government even though it secured an absolute majority in the Portuguese parliament and won a mandate to smash the austerity regime bequeathed by the EU-IMF Troika.
Those who make peaceful change impossible…. well, you know the rest.
I am incredulous.
It’s now quite clear that the European Union is anti-democratic to its core. It needs to be radically changed or abandoned. It was already very difficult to be simultaneously pro-democracy and pro-EU, given the “Euro treaties cannot be changed by elections” stance of the Eurocrats (and given how far out of their way they went to make sure that the treaties were not subject to referenda), but this is beyond the pale.
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marku52
Wow. Democracy must not be allowed to interfere with the sacred Market. That’s pretty naked. Some people in Europe must be wondering what the point of a national government is.
(Of course, here in the US, the point of voting escapes many of us….)
different clue
That’s not even legal, is it? I mean . . . under Portuguese law, don’t the actual winners of the election have a law-upholding court system to go through to get this stricken down?
And if they feel they don’t, then as Ian Welsh says . . .
Are there steps between hopeless acceptance and riots and civil war? Will the Portuguese euro-sceptics take those steps and will ineffectual American liberals behold and take some kind of heart thereby?
Lisa
Neo-liberalism is totally incompatoble with democracy. In their ideal world it would be just dictators, with the sprawling masses subjugated to their ‘betters’. Their perfect world is a return to the pre Adam Smith times. Neo-feudalism is actualy a better description.
Daniel Carrapa
My dear Ian, allow me to share the comment I’ve written on the Telegraph. From Portugal, my best regards…
As Emma Goldman once said: “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal”.
Anyway, our (Portuguese) president is just going through the motions. He has appointed the former-prime-minister, who (despite being the leader of the most voted political force) now holds a minority of the parliament. He will then go down into history as the prime-minister of the shortest government in Portuguese history, as all the other parties will endorse a motion of rejection.
And then? That’s when it will get interesting.
The decision of the Portuguese president, last week, was predictable, considering his narrow minded view of the constitution. What wasn’t as predictable was the level of drama he introduced in his declarations.
The socialist party is conducting a post-electoral agreement with two political forces on its left: the left bloc (10%) and the communist party (8%). However, those two parties have agreed to put aside their contrarian or anti-European views. Besides, the socialist party is not proposing a coalition government, but procuring a parliamentary support agreement – which is founded on a number of pre-negotiated conditions.
However, in his recent statements, the president acted as if Portugal was in the emergence of abandoning the Euro or the European Union, shatter its commitment to international treaties or abandon NATO. And he stated that we would oppose a government solution that depended on the support of political parties that defended such ideas.
And this, of course, is not only an obvious anti-democratic position, it raises a new problem. After the fall of the present government, will the president refuse to endorse a proposal of government conducted by the socialist party?
And what would happen then? Without the possibility of calling new elections – a power that is taken from him in the final six months of presidential mandate – would Portugal be surrendered to a “management government”, with limited powers and an hostile majority in parliament?
If so, the Portuguese president may be about to launch Portugal into a political swamp, the likes we’ve never seen before in our short 40 year old democracy.
atcooper
Brands as the new heraldry.
Andre
Here’s how it was carried by Reuters, the “great Reuters”:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/06/us-portugal-election-president-idUSKCN0S02MP20151006
The Tragically Flip
Obviously this is a disgusting use of the president’s powers over parliament. As the Portuguese president is directly elected, I am less clear about “coup” and such.
The right wing party has a plurality and the left coalition has promised to defeat them on a confidence vote immediately, which in theory should force the President to allow the left to form a government.
It sounds more like the president will wait the constitutionally required 6 months and call new elections. So portugal will be without a government for that time. Which could lead to a number of bad outcomes.
If there are impeachment procedures for the president, this would be the time to use them. He’s otherwise up for election next year.
In summary, I think this might be a legitimate exercise of his powers thus far, but it is the motive and explanation that makes it outrageous.
The Tragically Flip
I am really a fan of weak heads of state. A president, but elected by parliament or some other indirect means, and understood to only have discretion in very rare electoral outcomes. Anyone with a personal electoral mandate from the whole nation is inherently dangerous.
Peter VE
Has Silva forgotten 1974? The massively unpopular colonial wars in Africa led to the army overthrowing the Salazar dictatorship, followed by popular pressure for the establishment of democracy. I suspect most Portuguese are aware of their history.
JustPlainDave
The true test of democracy will be what they do in the face of a failed confidence vote. There’s no question in my mind that were David Johnson faced with the analogous situation here, he would invite the party with the largest number of seats to form a government and force even a formally constructed coalition to vote it down. Only then would he invite the coalition to form a government.
It sounds like the Portuguese system has the equivalent of a throne speech, so I would guess we’ll find out shortly…
EmilianoZ
It’s for the best. The Portuguese are probably as prepared to leave the Euro as the Greeks. People just wanna have their cake and eat it.
The age of revolution is past for Europe. You need a lotta young people to do a revolution, especially young men with nothing to do.
The only thing that can make the EU implode is the refugee crisis.
Tony Wikrent
I really want to interject here, though I think it will not be very popular. I wish people will ponder this example in contrast what was achieved by the adoption of the USA Constitution. Yes, some of the most fierce opponents of an independent American nation had left or been forced out during the Revolution, but there was a strong and certainly not quiescent group of people who opposed adoption of the Constitution, the anti-federalists.
http://www.thefederalistpapers.org/anti-federalist-papers
It is more than interesting that many of the arguments made by the anti-federalists are intensely popular among some of the most reactionary elements of the USA population today.
What Franklin, Washington, Hamilton, and others achieved (people may be surprised to learn that Jefferson was not a member of the Constitutional Convention) is, I hope, more fully appreciated when we are confronted by these examples of neo-liberal authoritarianism. It is very popular on the left to believe that the USA Constitution created a state which leads inevitably to this type of “dictatorship of the properteriat” (a brilliant phrase I attribute to S. Newberry), but I think that entirely ignores the fierce battle of ideas and ideologies that has never really ended, but which the anti-republican and anti-democratic forces of wealth and privilege have been increasingly winning the past half century and more, using agencies such as the Mont Pelerin Society. the American Enterprise Institute, and so on.
As one scholar noted, never before and never since in history, has a gathering of human beings delved so deeply and so deliberately into all the issues of government, and rule in an attempt to find a lasting balance between liberty and effective power. Yes, there was fear of, and provisions made against, democratic rule – but do you really want a structure of government that allows people such as those on the Texas School Board, or the Alabama state legislature, to rule without any checks, especially since they have been ushered into office by majority votes? With the sorry exception of the Alien and Sedition Acts (which came ten years after the Constitution, and which led to Jefferson defeating Adams, and were allowed to expire in 1800 and 1801), there was no attempt made to stifle opposition to the proposed Constitution and new form of government as direct and as brazen as this attempt to throttle opposition to the EU. In fact, the proponents of the Constitution engaged in open and prolonged debate with opponents, giving us one of the greatest treatises on politics ever.
And the state created has been able to effectively enlarge the spheres of participation to more and more citizens, though not as quickly, smoothly, and bloodlessly as we hope.
Stirling Newberry
The market was done years ago.
willf
Anyone with a personal electoral mandate from the whole nation is inherently dangerous.
Oh, ha ha. As if.
In reality, the US had just such a leader with just such a mandate after the 2008 election, and he threw it away in order to prop up the worst elements in a rotten system whose crash had made his election possible in the first place.
Pelham
Whenever people have a real choice, it’s viewed as a crisis of democracy. I guess that goes double for the EU.
bkjk
The E.U. is now just a U.S. vassal. It exists at this point for little reason other than to play “bad cop” to Washington while people like one commenter above fluff the “more democratic” U.S. federal system.
Erin Harris
After the travesty in Greece, I thought nothing could be really surprising — but this is.
Jeez, I guess we’re at war.
Lisa
Culture of Cruelty: the Age of Neoliberal Authoritarianism
by Henry Giroux
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/23/culture-of-cruelty-the-age-of-neoliberal-authoritarianism/
Hugh
Most of what can be said about the euro and EZ can be said about the EU. There are six fundamental problems:
1. The lack of a fair and democratic fiscal and debt union
2. A weak, and capricious, central bank interested only in defending an unsustainable status quo
3. An insolvent and predatory banking sector
4. Europe internal mercantilist trading patterns
5. Thoroughly corrupt political classes
6. A ruling kleptocratic class of the rich
At issue here is point 5, Europe’s political classes are in the bag for the rich who own them. The issue of democracy, the will of the people, does not even arise.
Re the US Constitution, it is important to note that at the time of its framing, women could not vote, slaves could not vote, and adult males without property could not vote. So at the outset, we are talking about an anti-democracy with only a small minority having the franchise. And even there, the “checks and balances” were about keeping most of the power in the hands of those with the most property, or those who represented their interests. We have been taught a distorted form of our history, where populism is always portrayed as dangerous, unreasoned, primally animalistic. It is the haunt of kooks, madmen, the mob, and commies, –whoever you are most likely to be afraid of. And who does all this portraying? our powers that be, that is the rich and propertied, of course.
larry
Ian, this is only part of the EU story. What took place in Portugal could not take place in other EU countries. What is going on here is neocon overreach. While we have to be concerned about what happened in Portugal, we have to remember that the governing structures of other EU countries are different. This could never have happened in Holland, for instance.
Erin Harris
What do you think should be done, Ian?
After sleeping on this horror, the response I keep coming back to is General Strike — no work/no shopping that would benefit the predators — and for other countries to join Portugal in it.
Of course, one also thinks of having fits in the streets, but a dignified Refusal and Repudiation clearly sets the victims on the high road.
Nunes
I live in Portugal and I have to say there is some anger towards the president for what he said in his speech. But the situation is very different from what it is being described here.
At the moment there is no Left-wing coalition.
There is one minority party (PS) who is still trying to make a parliamentary agreement with other left-wing parties so that PS can form a government only by itself. That agreement not only is not yet made but it doesn’t guarantee a stable government for the next 4 years because the government won’t have a majority in parliament, it will have to negotiate for almost everything. History also goes against this kind of agreement.
So, instead, the president chose to give the most voted party a chance to form government and not PS, in the hopes that it will be able to negotiate something with PS.
It is completely within his rights and follows an established practice.
It will now be up to the parliament and the parties to decide what is the next step.
The problem is that the president made a really bad speech that showed him as not being an impartial president.
Stirling Newberry
Note the difference:
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/poland-shifts-to-right-as-law-and-justice-set-to-govern-alone-1.2405603
someofparts
speaking of Eurosceptics –
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/25/poland-lurches-to-right-with-election-of-law-and-justice-party
someofparts
gah – sorry for the redundant redundancy
tejo
We Europeans need two things. A lawer wit balls who’ s willing to fight. And the other thing is the VN resolution 1514. That’s all. Who?
Mandos
What Cavaco Silva said/did was probably not a coup as I understand it, but it displays the attitude of the elite of Europeriphery countries that displayed itself during the Greek drama. They explicitly joined the EU to keep left-wing parties in check and continue to support it to that end.
different clue
Here is a Naked Capitalism post claiming that events in Portugal are not the breaking-of-Portugal’s-own-laws that we were initially told they were. I offer the link in case it may have merit.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/10/british-euroskeptics-go-off-the-deep-end-flog-bogus-portugal-coup-meme.html
Lisa
I have said ths over and over. ‘The Left’ political activists have to get their acts together.
In their hearts they are still all hoping for a Roosovelt (etc) to ‘save’ them. Someone, like a Bliar tells them nice stories and they all believe it and go to sleep.
Nope it means, take a leaf from the more successful LGBTI communty, endless activism from the ground up. Never give up…which the ‘left’ always does these days.
I mean, the LGBTI community has even managed to get gay, lesbian and trans people accepted in many military establishments…. the centres of conservatism (and in the long term that will make for some interesting differences).
I do not want to be cruel but I do want to shake you up. You have lost because you do not belive in your hearts what you say you want. And not a single one of you will get up of your arses to do anything.
I could give you screeds about so many brave LGBTI people putting it out on the line to make things better for the rest of us… Yes even facing being killed. But we do it.
different clue
Of course, there is the little caveat that LGBT rights don’t cost the Overclass any money, nor do they threaten the current property and power pyramid, as the Log Mansion Republicans might admit if forced to do so.
Trying to change the power and property pyramid around will cause the established governments to use Saddam Hussein/ al Assad methods to put down the social class rebellions.
Perhaps the Left is not yet ready for that kind of megadeath combat.
cant_be_anonymous
hahahaha!!
European races had imposed such models on the colonies. Now they want to taste their own medicine just like anglo empire brought draconian laws in their own countries which they had introduced in the colonies through stooge parliaments and ‘presidents’ or ‘monarch!!
I hope they enjoy the come back to Roman empire (whole anglo empire came out of slav dungeons of Romans…) to own their asss !!!