Boaventura de Sousa Santos says that the PS majority in Portugal is bad for more left-leaning policies.

Opera Mundi - In the program 20 MINUTES INTERNATIONAL This Thursday (03/02), journalist Breno Altman interviewed Boaventura de Sousa Santos, director of the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra and scientific coordinator of the Permanent Observatory of Portuguese Justice.

He gave an overview of the legislative elections that took place in Portugal last Sunday (January 30th), which culminated in the Socialist Party obtaining an absolute majority in Parliament and definitively burying the "geringonça," the left-wing coalition between the PS, the Left Bloc, and the Communist Party.

“The Socialist Party is free, and that doesn't bode well for the more left-leaning policies we want. I'm not going to say that the Socialist Party isn't left-wing, because I think it is, but there are many right-leaning tendencies within it that don't believe the Socialist Party should form alliances with the right. But I think António Costa [the Prime Minister] has more progressive tendencies, so let's see what he's going to do,” the intellectual stated.

Santos explained that two factors led to the "absolutely surprising" result last Sunday: the control of the pandemic and the growth of the far right in the country.

“Portugal was one of the few countries that did not politicize the pandemic or the protection against the pandemic, thanks to the government and the opposition. The leader of the main opposition party, the Social Democratic Party, even said that the enemy at that moment was the pandemic, not the Socialist Party. Furthermore, we are the country with one of the highest complete vaccination rates in the world, and that is a merit,” he explained.

Regarding the far right, the intellectual argued that the population was alarmed to see that Chega, the conservative party in Portugal nostalgic for the Salazar regime, appeared as one of the forces that would grow the most during the elections.

“The Portuguese feared that the stability we were achieving would be jeopardized, and António Costa immediately created a cordon sanitaire around Chega, rejecting the possibility of governing with them. On the other hand, this rejection did not happen on the part of the PSD, especially when the polls showed a technical tie between them and the PS. When people saw that the current government project might not continue, that there could be a right-wing coalition, they opted for the strategic vote—punishing the Left Bloc and the Communist Party,” he argued.

Left-wing parties, in fact, went so far as to accuse the Socialist Party of deliberately imploding the "geringonça" (left-wing alliance) when it proposed a more conservative budget than expected, which both the Left Bloc and the Portuguese Communist Party felt they could not support, in order to achieve an absolute majority.

Santos disagreed with this hypothesis, stating, "I find it hard to believe that a prime minister would want elections during a pandemic." He believes that the PCP and the Left Bloc have obtained worse results in each election precisely because of their alignment with the PS, which is not seen as left-wing by many sectors of the population.

As a result of this entire situation, from the failed budget to the early elections, the intellectual stated that the Portuguese project of combining the Marxist tradition, in its various forms, with social democracy as a strategy for overcoming capitalism “has failed, for now.”

“There is a lot of mutual resentment. The PCP now wants to engage in mass struggle to be the opposition. If the left-wing forces don't engage in self-criticism, if they don't unite, the far right will come to power and the first victims will be the left-wing forces, regardless of their political leaning. On the left, we have a habit of polarizing differences because we don't have a transitional theory to achieve our goal,” he reflected.

Directions of the left in the world

Santos also reflected in general terms on the direction of the global left. He said that he is not convinced by either the possibility of a "left-wing populism" or the move towards neoliberalism, which is more reformist.

"For me, there is no such thing as left-wing populism, only right-wing populism. And now we are left without reformism. Without reformism and without revolution. All that remains is counter-reformism, in which someone like Bolsonaro comes along and destroys labor and social rights as if they were nothing, without any uprising," he criticized.

The intellectual argued that left-wing parties should unite to organize a new transition, one that neither allies with liberalism nor opts for a complete break, but that continues to fight against capital, "and when I say capital I am referring to the racism and sexism that are structural to capitalism."

“The problem is that we know what we don’t want, but we don’t know what we do want. We live under a logic of infinite growth that no longer serves us. We have representative democracies that are good starting points, but they shouldn’t be the end points,” he reflected.

Thinking about this new transition, in Santos' opinion, is becoming increasingly urgent, especially given capitalism's capacity for reform and the "destructive drive" of neoliberalism: "I don't believe in the idea of ​​a crisis of capitalism, because it was predicted decades ago and the system is able to reform itself, but the capitalism we have now, neoliberalism, has a destructive drive that puts life on the planet at risk. It not only destroys to build, it destroys for the sake of destroying," he warned.