The Crisis of the Portuguese Left
The Portuguese Socialist Party once seemed to be a model for Europe’s center left, gaining support while its sister parties were in decline. But this year’s election was a crushing defeat that saw the Socialists fall behind the far-right group Chega.
The Portuguese experience played out as a new way to deal with questions of power and government. (Patricia de Melo Moreira / AFP via Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Daniel Finn
Ten years ago, the Portuguese Socialist leader António Costa formed a government with the support of two radical-left parties, the Left Bloc and the Communist Party (PCP). Costa’s government appeared to be a success story for the European center left at a time when most of its parties were losing ground. Portugal also stood out as one of the few West European countries where the far right was still a marginal force.
Costa’s party increased its vote share in 2019, and in the 2022 election, the Socialists even won an absolute majority in parliament. But Costa resigned as prime minister by the end of the following year, and his party went on to lose power after the fourth general election in less than a decade.
Another election this year was a disaster for the Socialist Party and the radical left. With 23 percent of the vote, the Socialists fell behind the far-right party Chega, which is now the second-largest force in parliament. The combined vote share for the Left Bloc and the Communist Party was less than a third of the figure from 2015.
We spoke to Catarina Príncipe about the last decade of Portuguese politics. Príncipe is a contributing editor for Jacobin and coeditor of the book Europe in Revolt: Mapping the New European Left. This is an edited transcript from Jacobin Radio’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the two-part interview here and here.
By the time of the 2015 election, what had been the impact of the eurozone crisis and the troika programs for Portuguese society and politics?
We have to start with the financial crisis of 2007–8. Portugal was ruled by a Socialist Party government at the time with José Sócrates as prime minister. There were adjustment programs in the form of bank bailouts, wage reductions, and small but steady cuts to social services. But at the same time — and this was clearly due to European directions — there was a big boost in public investment, as some sort of Keynesian answer to the crisis.
There was a moment around 2010 when, for both political and economic reasons, this structure didn’t hold any more: on the one hand, because public debt was rising; on the other hand, because the direction from the EU came to an end. After all, German banks needed refinancing. At the same time, there were a lot of tensions within the Portuguese political arena. Parliament ended up passing a motion of no confidence and the government fell in 2011.
The two big parties in Portugal are the Social Democrats and the Socialists, which means the center right and the center left. Portuguese parties tend to have very left-wing names because they were all formed during the revolutionary process of 1974–75. The center left, the center right, and a third party, the Christian conservatives, had already signed the memorandum with the troika. The Right won the 2011 election in a context where the memorandum was already going to be applied.
Austerity is presented as a state of exception — an exceptional political moment where many different measures can be applied during the phase of crisis, such as harsh policies of labor devaluation and deep social spending cuts. The context for the next election in 2015 was the impoverishment of the majority of workers and pensioners, the rise of indirect and direct taxes, and the privatization of public goods and services, along with many strategic companies.
There was an undisguised attack on labor laws, with collective bargaining virtually disappearing. The right-wing government went even further than the troika asked it to go over some measures, such as cuts to public holidays or an increase in working hours, which was actually banned by the constitutional court in Portugal.
Austerity also plays a role in imposing more conservative social dynamics. Portugal had to mobilize not the welfare state but rather the welfare society — the welfare family. Because of all the cuts and the steep rise in unemployment levels, there were several generations living under one roof and dependent on one household income, with grandparents paying for the survival of their children and grandchildren. That implies a more conservative way of organizing social roles, and it tears the social fabric apart, making people more vulnerable and more dependent.
Greece underwent a very similar experience to that of Portugal, but on a harsher scale and at a faster pace. I think this was for a very specific reason, namely the capacity for mobilization against austerity. In Greece, social movements gained a lot of traction and ended up electing a left-wing party into government (with all the shortcomings and difficulties that came after). In Portugal, we did not experience that kind of upsurge.
There were some very big mobilizations, but they weren’t able to develop into something more sustained and more grounded. This was not because there were no left-wing parties — both the Left Bloc and the Portuguese Communist Party were very active in these mobilizations — but rather because we did not have the same degree of organization in communities and workplaces as could be found in Greek society.
When the first Costa government was formed after the 2015 election, how did the arrangement with the radical-left parties come about? What was included in the agreement for government, and what was excluded?
Portugal always had the role of the “good student” in the eurozone — Angela Merkel said it many times — because we didn’t have the same degree of social mobilization and didn’t produce an anti-austerity party on the same scale as Syriza in Greece. As a result, there were forms of assistance that the European Central Bank (ECB) gave to Portugal that it did not give to Greece.
One important example is the Public Sector Purchase Programme, which allowed the ECB to buy Portuguese debt bonds directly. This was something that Greece had asked for and that was supposedly not permitted according to the rules of the ECB. Yet Portugal was given access to this program — in fact, it was specifically designed for Portugal. The troika helped Portugal in ways that it did not help Greece, and this made it possible to pass the troika evaluation so that the Portuguese government would not have to ask for a second bailout.
This was the backdrop to the 2015 elections. There was a narrative that said, “If you’re willing to make sacrifices, it’s worth it in the end, because now we’re out of the bailout program.” There was a mantra constantly being repeated: “Portugal is not Greece, Portugal is not Greece.” This was just a few months after Syriza had been forced to accept an even harsher austerity program.
The Socialist Party did not win the election: it came second in terms of vote share, behind the right-wing alliance between the Social Democrats and the Christian conservatives. But under the Portuguese parliamentary system, we do not elect a prime minister — we elect a parliament composed of various parties, which then forms a government. For the first time in the post-revolutionary period, there was a parliamentary majority for the Socialist Party and the parties of the radical left. If the Socialists, the Communist Party, and the Left Bloc could reach an agreement, they would be able to form a stable government.
The governmental agreement was part of a tactical approach by the Left Bloc and the Communist Party. During the election campaign, the left parties challenged the Socialists by saying that if they agreed to carry out particular policies, then the Left would support a Socialist-led government. There were a number of policies that they put on the table, such as reversing public-spending cuts, reinstating national holidays, and increasing the minimum wage.
These proposals were supposed to be the starting point for negotiations, but they ended up being the conclusion. The agreement with the Socialist Party put aside all the fundamental measures from the political programs of the Left Bloc and the PCP, delegating questions like the reform of labor laws and the restructuring of public debt to working groups that ended up going absolutely nowhere over the next four years.
In addition, this agreement was supposed to last for one year, but it became the baseline for the next four years. The measures proposed by the left parties were not carried out in the space of a year, as they were originally supposed to be. They were carried out over four years (and not carried out in full). The two parties agreed to vote for António Costa as prime minister and support his government’s budgets, but they did not take positions in his cabinet.
This arrangement did last for the full parliamentary term until the next election in 2019. How would you summarize the overall track record of the first Costa government? What were the contrasts or continuities with previous governments, and what was the ongoing relationship between the Socialists and the radical left?
I’ll start with the last question about the relationship with the Left. During the negotiations and then over the course of the whole legislative session, the two left parties never negotiated with one another or spoke to one another — they only communicated with the Socialist Party. That enabled the Socialists to control most of the information, while the left parties never discussed or debated collectively how they could deal with Costa.
While this government did stop the full-throttle process of impoverishment, I have difficulty in saying that it completely broke with the dynamics of austerity, if we understand austerity as not merely a form of fiscal discipline, but also as the liberalization of the labor market and the rolling back of state capacities. There was also no concrete rupture between this experience of the Socialist Party governing with the Left and previous examples of the Socialists governing by themselves.
If we look at the government’s record over four years, it did carry out measures such as restoring the value of pensions and restoring part of the progressive taxation system. But at the same time, there were historically low rates of public investment, and the labor laws that the troika had imposed were basically left untouched. Precarious working conditions were still on the rise, although there were a couple of small programs in this area. Collective bargaining was still in retreat, and public services like health and education were still crumbling because they were completely underfunded.
Although the privatization of TAP, the Portuguese national airline, was reversed, the postal service remained in private hands, along with the energy sector. During the crisis, one of the biggest Portuguese banks crashed and the state bailed it out, but there was no discussion about establishing public control of the banking sector, or at least over the banks that had been bailed out. Moreover, the question of debt, which was one of the most important political subjects for the whole of southern Europe throughout this period, disappeared from the public agenda.
I would say that there was a rupture with austerity and the troika program to some extent, but there was no rupture with the social liberalism of the Socialist Party from before 2008. That shows the weakness of the left parties in how they dealt with this agreement and this negotiating structure.
In the 2019 election, broadly speaking, we can say that the vote for the Socialist Party went up quite significantly, the vote for the Left Bloc remained more or less the same as it had been in 2015, while the vote for the Communists went down. Why do you think that was the outcome?
I think we have to look back at the previous election, which came in the midst of “Pasokification,” the decline of Europe’s traditional social democratic parties. The Portuguese Socialist Party was very clever in its approach. Given the composition of the 2015 parliament, it could have gone for a grand coalition with the center right or it could have negotiated with the Left. The second course was the only way for the party to survive, because if it had been linked with the Portuguese right that had just imposed the troika agreement, it would have suffered the same fate as its sister organizations across Europe.
I don’t want to be overly deterministic about this, but I think that was their reading of the situation. The Socialist Party was very smart in giving a bear hug to the Left, and the Left did not know how to maneuver in that situation. My opinion at the time was that the Left Bloc and the Communist Party could have pushed the agreement much further. By 2019, they were starting to feel the effect of this bear hug, which they could not get out of.
The Socialists now started to grow again, and the left parties were caught in a weird dynamic where they were trying to argue that if anything good happened during those four years, it was because of the Left, but if anything bad happened, it was because the Left wasn’t strong enough. That didn’t compute very well with the electorate.
In 2019, the difference between the Left Bloc and the Communists was primarily a matter of communication strategies. The Left Bloc was better able to capitalize on the small gains of the past four years than the PCP. At the same time, there was a fundamental difference between the electoral bases of the two parties. The Communist base was much more ideological than the base of the Left Bloc, so the feeling of discomfort with this parliamentary arrangement took hold at an earlier stage.
During Costa’s second term, the “contraption” arrangement eventually came to a formal end in 2021. The Left Bloc cited as a key point of difference the aborted reform of labor law. You can draw a parallel here with Spain: in contrast with Portugal, Unidas Podemos insisted on taking up ministerial positions instead of supporting the [Pedro] Sánchez government from the outside, and Yolanda Díaz took the position of labor minister because she wanted to shepherd through reform of labor law. However, she also came under pressure to water down the reform.
In both Spain and Portugal, it was a question of restoring the rights that workers had before the Great Recession, so we’re not talking about some kind of revolutionary, anti-capitalist structural reform; we’re talking about rights that were perfectly compatible with the functioning of Portuguese capitalism or Spanish capitalism before 2008. Yet that still seemed to be too much. What do you think was the significance of that moment, and how did the choice by the Left Bloc and the Communists to withdraw their support lead to the snap election of 2022?
The Portuguese experience played out as a new way to deal with questions of power and government. The radical left did not win an election and lead a government, as in the case of Greece; nor did it enter government as a junior partner, as in the case of Spain. The idea was that supporting a government in parliament without taking ministerial positions gives you more freedom because you’re not bound by a program.
However, it didn’t work like that in practice, because the Left wasn’t capable of maneuvering over some of the central issues. Those issues were pushed to the side, while at the same time, the Left was not able to gain from the positive things that did happen. I think that was the understanding both left parties started to develop after four years.
There’s another point I would make in relation to Spain. From its inception, Podemos was a different type of party when compared with the PCP or the Left Bloc. From the start, Podemos was a party that wanted to govern, with much fewer political restrictions. Whatever we might say about left populism, the way in which Podemos was willing to deal with the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) reflected a very different strategic understanding from those of the Portuguese parties. That proved to be important in the moments when those decisions had to be taken.
When the rupture with Costa eventually came, neither the PCP nor the Left Bloc had clear red lines over when and where to break the agreement. They were not in conversation with each other. What still remains of a trade union movement in Portugal is still very much politically related to the PCP, which meant that during those four years, the labor movement was very quiet.
The left parties started to understand that this was a lose-lose situation. To be honest, the reasons they gave for the eventual break were there from the beginning. Both parties had agreed to put the question of Portugal’s labor laws to a working group back in 2015. They never made it a central question, which it should have been. That was the agreement they signed.
Another reason was the underfunding of the national health system. Again, the left parties had voted for a series of annual state budgets that provided no real public investment for the social state. There had not been an adequate debate within the Left about how to deal with this situation, and then after six years, it was no longer possible to continue. But once you reach that stage, it is already too late, as the results of the following years confirm.
What was going on in terms of social mobilization from 2015 onward if we look outside the realm of high politics — was society relatively quiescent in these years?
The honest answer is that there wasn’t much going on. During the troika years, we had some important moments of mobilization. There’s a difference between a moment and a movement: in Greece and Spain, there was an accumulation of energy over time, whereas in Portugal, we had moments of indignation with very big demonstrations, but then they would fade out.
That happened again in 2015. First of all, we did not have the same degree of mobilization because the Costa government was seen as some kind of vindication after the right-wing austerity government that came before it. Because they supported the government, the left parties contributed to this narrative. This helps explain why there were no new movements. There was also a feeling of tiredness and despair from the experience of austerity.
Having said that, there are new social movements today that have started since 2022 or thereabouts, very focused on the question of housing. There are also new movements about racism that have been able to cut through and link different issues: for example, linking the question of housing with the experience of racialized communities that live in ghetto situations. It’s not a situation where nothing is happening: there was a moment where very little happened, but now things are coming up again.
In 2022, there was a snap election and the Socialists won an absolute majority in parliament — it looked like a moment of triumph for Costa as the most successful leader of the West European center left. Yet by the end of the following year, he had resigned as prime minister after a very murky corruption scandal where the prosecutors appeared to have confused Costa with another politician who had a similar name.
When the Socialist Party won an absolute majority in 2022, the fears about the bear hug of the Left became a reality. The scandal that led to Costa’s downfall is complicated to explain.
The public prosecutor’s office had taped phone calls between government ministers that were supposedly involved in corruption involving lithium mining concessions in the Romano (Montalegre) and Barroso (Boticas) mines, a project for a hydrogen-based power plant in Sines, and the construction of a data center. The office sent an investigative warning to the prime minister saying that he was going to be investigated for corruption in this case involving his environment minister and a member of his office staff.
A few weeks later, it emerged that the “António Costa” who was referred to in those wiretapped conversations was not the prime minister — it was somebody else. If you know anything about Portugal, you will know that those two names, António and Costa, are some of the most popular names in the Portuguese language. That was the scandal, or non-scandal. They are still investigating whether or not there was corruption in this case, but we are fairly certain that the prime minister was not involved.
The fact that he resigned at this point when he had an absolute majority in parliament is for me the interesting question. The Socialist Party was on a recovery path in a way that many people didn’t consider possible back in 2015, when they couldn’t beat the right-wing parties in the election, let alone win a majority.
There are a couple of issues that might explain Costa’s decision to resign. One was that after seven years in office, there was a mixed evaluation of his record. Clearly people were still voting for him. But were they voting for Costa because they still wanted him to be the prime minister, or because they wanted his party to govern, or because the specific situation of the center-right party promoted tactical voting?
The leader of the Social Democrats had said that he would have no problem negotiating a governmental agreement with Chega, the far-right party, which had entered parliament for the first time in 2019. That prompted some tactical voting for the Socialist Party, including by many people who otherwise have voted for the PCP or the Left Bloc.
In addition, it was the left parties that decided to end the “contraption” arrangement with the Socialists, so they took the blame for that in the minds of people who saw this as a positive experience after the years of austerity under the troika. If you look at the specific measures that the radical left was proposing for the election in 2022, they weren’t very different from what the Socialist Party was proposing.
Meanwhile, you had a pattern in the Portuguese press where it seemed like every day, there was a new scandal (but it wasn’t a scandal) or a new episode of corruption (but it turned out that it wasn’t related to the Socialist Party). There was clearly a feeling of tiredness about António Costa that would have been hard for him to maneuver around. At the same time, there were already rumors in the air that there might be a position for him in Europe.
We also have to mention the role of an important figure who is often overlooked, the Portuguese president. Since 2016, the president has been Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who comes from the Social Democrats. Rebelo de Sousa has a strong presence as a political personality. He was very proud of being the one who managed the stability of the Costa government, calling the party leaders on a daily basis during the contraption years.
At the time when Costa resigned, he could have appointed a new prime minister from the Socialist Party, which had an absolute majority. But he chose not to. I think Costa resigned because he knew he wasn’t guilty of the allegations against him, and then the president accepted his resignation because he was entering the final years of his own mandate and wanted to finish his term as president with a center-right government in place.
This is another area where it’s interesting to make a comparison with Spain. The Sánchez government has faced various accusations from sections of the judiciary. Some of the allegations that were made against Sánchez (and against his wife in particular) were transparently bogus and partisan.
In the past few months, there has been a much more credible scandal involving not Sánchez himself but some of his political allies. Throughout all of this, it has been clear that the Spanish judiciary is heavily partisan and politicized, albeit to varying extents depending on which court we are talking about. Does the Portuguese legal system also have a track record of partisanship, or would it have been more surprising if there was some kind of agenda coming out of the prosecutor’s office?
The judiciary in Spain is traditionally more openly partisan and right-wing than in Portugal. This is linked to the way that new democratic states were formed in the 1970s: in Spain through a transition from above, in Portugal through a revolution. Over the past few years, however, there have clearly been shifts in the Portuguese legal system.
For a while, Costa had a minister of justice who tried to talk about this, and she was completely shut down. If we look at some of the main judges in the courts with powers of decision — for example, whether or not you open an investigation of the prime minister — they are clearly and openly much more right-wing. We are also seeing more prosecutions of left-wing political activists. This aligns very well with a political shift that is happening with the growth of the far right.
The housing crisis in Portugal has become one of the key issues in recent years, with obvious parallels to developments in other countries, from Spain to Ireland. How did the current situation take shape, and have there been any serious attempts to alleviate the crisis?
Portugal is one of the European countries with the lowest public ownership of housing — 2 percent. This is the result of a very important choice that was made, beginning under fascism and carrying on under democracy, based on the idea that if you build cheap, affordable housing for working people, that will change their identity. If you are a worker but you are also an owner, you will be less prone to support the Communist Party, for example.
This idea of owning your own house is a line that has continued from fascism to democracy. When we had the revolution, part of this narrative changed. Yet at the same time, Portugal was a country with a very high level of impoverishment. A lot of people lived in shanty towns, so there was an urgent need to resolve the question of housing.
It was resolved in three different ways. One way, which was unfortunately the least significant, was the creation of housing cooperatives. The second was the construction of what we call social housing that was low in quality and intended only for very poor families. The third, which was by far the most important, involved public-private programs that made use of European structural funds to support construction companies.
This also required the development of a banking sector (which was publicly owned in Portugal until 1992). Access to this newly built housing was always based on credit. Since Portugal has been a country of owners rather than a country of renters since the fascist period, people tend to want to own their own house. The only serious public program ever put in place in modern Portuguese history when it came to housing was the provision of state support for credit.
Of course, this is not sufficient. It wasn’t sufficient at the time, and it’s certainly not sufficient today. We have the boom in tourism generating high pressure in the market, as people transform houses into Airbnbs. There are whole neighborhoods in Lisbon owned by investment funds like BlackRock.
You also had schemes like the “golden visas” that granted foreign citizens Portuguese residency straight away if they bought a high-value house. The scheme only ended a couple of years ago, although you can still get residency if you invest, commonly in investment funds, at least €500,000. Both options granted the holders of golden visas immediate access to the European market.
When it comes to rent control, there are rules for what we call long-term renting. If you rent a house for a long time, you cannot just go from paying €300 a month to paying €900 a month, for example. But if the majority of people renting are young and starting out in life, these restrictions on rent increases do not apply to them.
Lisbon is now the most expensive European city for renters in relation to the average salary. The average rent is nearly €1,500 while the average salary is less than €1,300. It’s a ticking time bomb of social conflict because people are being forced out of their homes and out of the cities. The levels of homelessness have increased significantly, and this is one of the issues that the far right has used to build support by blaming immigrants for the crisis.
After a period when Portugal stood out as a country where the far right didn’t have national political representation, there has been a steady rise in support for Chega to the point where it is now the second-largest force in parliament. How would you characterize this Portuguese version of the far right, in comparison with some of the other European far-right parties? What is the particular role of André Ventura as the party leader?
Chega is very much a neoliberal party. The role it assigns to the state is one of vigilance and control rather than job creation, public investment, or ownership of strategic economic sectors. But its program is also being made on an ad hoc basis — we cannot find a consistent ideological background, or even a consistent position on many topics. It develops as the topics of the day develop, and that is very hard for the Left to deal with.
André Ventura was a member of the Social Democratic Party. He became well-known in local elections when he ran a campaign about the gypsy community in the municipality, saying the kind of things about gypsies that had not previously been said in public. He saw an opportunity with a moment of crisis for the Right in Portugal as well as in other countries, and he took that opportunity. Chega is something of a one-man party: even for local elections, his face is on all the posters, along with the faces of the local candidates.
Ventura has an interesting background: he studied law, and he actually wrote his PhD thesis on the rights of migrants. He has been able to build a sort of grand social coalition between a section of the Portuguese bourgeoisie that is clearly supporting him — media groups, some industries with low value added — and the small shop owners and people who are lost and desperate. It’s not really the party of the educated middle class — it’s the party of working people struggling on very low incomes, combined with a fraction of the Portuguese bourgeoisie.
That sets us up for the last two elections in 2024 and 2025. The two big stories of those elections are a big fall in support for the Socialist Party and a big rise in support for Chega. What do you think is the explanation for that shift to the Right?
I think the election of 2024 was the continuation of the one in 2022. With the exception of Livre, which was the only party on the Left of the spectrum that gained more support, the vote for the entire left declined. The last few years have resolved in the worst way possible the crisis of the Right, because suddenly we had the same number of parties on the Right as we had on the Left.
This was not normal, especially not for a country that emerged from a revolutionary process with dozens of different parties that popped up. Chega ended up as the big winner from this crisis, pulling the center of gravity for Portuguese politics in general to the right, including the Social Democrats.
There are several different explanations for this outcome. The bear hug of the radical left by the Socialists meant that for people who were angry about the political system as a whole, the Left was no longer an alternative. Chega and to a lesser extent Livre were the only parties that had not been part of governmental arrangements. At a moment when there was a perception of crisis, that played a big role.
Chega also had the capacity to mobilize traditional nonvoters. Abstention rates in Portugal have been quite high for a long time. In 2019, more than 51 percent of those eligible did not cast a vote. By 2024, the abstention rate had fallen to 40 percent, which was the lowest level since before the economic crash. Sociological studies indicate that young voters are turning to the far right in greater numbers than older generations.
The bear hug, the lack of solutions, a sense of fatigue with the Socialist Party, the wobbly position of the Social Democrats, and Chega’s ability to mobilize people who hadn’t voted previously are what explain the rise of the far right. Of course, we also have to take account of external factors. The Right is on the rise more or less everywhere in Europe and in the United States. But I don’t think that international trend is enough to explain the concrete shifts that are happening in Portugal, in view of our history and the speed of the transformation.
This year, the PCP and the Left Bloc were reduced to a collective vote share of about 5 percent, less than a third of their combined support in 2015. Have those parties engaged in discussion about where they go now? Do they have any plans or prospects for recovery?
There was an unfounded expectation for this year’s election that the PCP was going to disappear while the Left Bloc would do at least a little better. That didn’t happen: the Communists got just under 3 percent of the vote, while the Left Bloc fell to 2 percent. This testifies to the resilience of the PCP — a resilience in decay, but still some kind of resilience.
The Left has now been reduced to its bare bones. The people that are on the Left today are the ones who will vote for the Left no matter what. The vote for the Left Bloc is lower than its starting point back in 1999. We need to have deep strategic conversation about what the experience of the Left Bloc meant. In my opinion, it was not the form of the party that was a problem in itself. It was more importantly this specific experience with power.
Every time the Left comes near power, it has to make complicated choices. When you lose sight of forms of rupture and forms of counterpower rooted in strong labor and community organizations, this is what is going to happen. Either you are going to transform into the party that you were able to supplant, like Syriza in Greece, or else you are going to lose support and end up in a position like the Left Bloc, reduced to 125,000 votes.
Another problem is that when these debates are happening in the heat of the moment, they are not very helpful. This is a debate that should have started before the moment came. It didn’t, so it ends up being very hard because you’re navigating and trying to survive.
We can point out some things that are important and that the Left has been engaging with. The question of housing is definitely a big one: it’s an unsolved crisis that is getting worse. The right wing has no answer to it, because the idea of building private housing while the prices are completely insane, with no form of control and no public ownership, is not going to resolve the crisis. This is a question that might give the Left some room for maneuver.
The Left also needs to continue trying to find an answer for the question of racism and migration. This is a big question that we weren’t used to dealing with because we did not have a lot of migrants. For decades, Portugal’s biggest export was labor. We were a country of emigrants, not immigrants, but now that is changing.
There are a lot of people coming to Portugal from very different backgrounds. You have “digital nomads” from countries like Germany or the US who have fiscal benefits and can pay for housing at the current prices, but they have a very specific work relation because their employers are not based here. Then you have very poor, low-skilled migrant workers from Bangladesh, Nepal, and some of Portugal’s former colonies, particularly in the construction sector and the big agricultural enterprises in the south. There are also a lot of Brazilian people, and that is a less homogenous group.
We never previously had the idea that a person could go on TV and blame someone who wears a turban — this was new to us, and I don’t think we knew how to deal with it. The questions of migration and housing overlap. I don’t think we can look at migration and racism as a question of humanism. It is a question that is connected with labor, and an opening for a debate about labor conditions. That’s how we should frame the issue of migration.
The unemployment rate in Portugal is currently very low, so people don’t feel that immigrants are coming to replace them in their jobs. It is mainly the cost of housing that concerns them, as well as access to social services like health care. The argument of the far right is to blame immigration for the fact people can’t afford to live in Portuguese cities anymore.
Again, there is no market solution for the housing crisis, so it does open up avenues of possibility. I don’t think the Left is there right now. We also just held local elections in October. These elections have historically been bad for the Left Bloc, because the party has never had a strong social implementation at local level. The Communists, on the other hand, have traditionally had a much stronger local base.
However, the elections were still disastrous for both parties. The Left Bloc lost almost all its local representatives. Even in places where the party ran in coalition with other parties, the results were worse than in past electoral cycles. The PCP managed to keep many of its representatives, even winning new city governments, but lost most of its historical strongholds.
Meanwhile, the Socialist Party lost out in Lisbon and Porto alike. Both cities will now be run by the Social Democrats, who were the winners of the local elections. But the most striking result was Chega’s. They didn’t reach the threshold they set for themselves, but they did win city governments and are now locally represented across the country.
In many places, Chega representatives will probably form part of local executives, since the distribution of seats has not given the two main parties absolute majorities in many cities. In my opinion, this shows us two things: firstly, the Left is in a profound crisis with no end in sight, and secondly, the party system in Portugal has changed from a bipartisan to a tripartisan model.
Then there is going to be a presidential election in January next year, so the moment is continuously geared toward preparing for elections. I don’t think there has been a serious strategic debate yet, but I hope there will be soon.
How would you assess the prospects for the Portuguese economic model when it comes to growth and living standards over the next few years?
Right now, we have an economy based on tourism, and tourist economies are highly volatile. There is no unemployment because of the service sector that has developed for mass tourism. Going back a decade, tourism offered a way out of austerity and provided the first Costa government with some room for maneuver. You had the crisis in the Middle East that resulted in people trying to find new destinations that were peaceful and cheap.
This touristification of the Portuguese economy was the main reason why it was possible to have growth without public investment. It forms part of a continuous historical process of deindustrialization, substituting credit for value generated by labor. Today there is a tourism boom and a new form of economic specialization in other sectors like construction, finance, and health. A lot of people come here as retirees to enjoy the benefits of a public health system: it’s crumbling, but it’s still there, and if you want to have private health insurance, it’s cheaper than in many other places.
The low levels of unemployment have maintained social peace, because average wages are low. The minimum wage is less than €900 a month, and many people in the service sector work for the minimum wage or not much more.
The tension arises when people cannot pay for a house anymore, but at least they are still getting by — they can survive because they still have a job. If we have any hint of recession coming from countries like Germany, the periphery of the EU is going to pay for it, as it usually does in one way or another. In those circumstances, the prospects are not very good.
It’s hard to organize people in the service and tourism sectors because they change jobs frequently and often have precarious working contracts. You also have the pressure of the housing crisis forcing people to move to other places, so the idea of community organizing becomes more difficult as well — when people are displaced, they spend more time commuting. When you lose the roots and connections to the place where you used to live, that poses another problem for community organizing.
The solutions to these challenges are not simple, but they would certainly involve public housing and new forms of collective ownership. We also need some form of public banking system that can assist with housing finance, and we need to rethink what public investment means. What do you want to be as a country? What are your main industries and your main capabilities?
The problem with all of this is that we belong to the European Union, so we’re tightly constrained in a lot of the choices we can make. That is still one of the central questions for the Left, as it was in 2015 for Greece, and we still don’t know how to deal with it.