Veteran center-left politician Antonio Jose Seguro has won 66% of the vote, seeing off a challenge from the far-right.
If we have learned anything from the last decade, the centre-left now is faced with a dilemma: deep reforms to drain the abscess that oozed out the fascists or continue with neoliberal business as usual, effectively giving the far right time to regroup and try again next time.
Most comments here to have the wrong idea.
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They are liberal, soc-dem at best. Saying they are socialist, is like saying the people’s republic of north Korea is a republic for the people.
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In Portugal the president is mainly just a figure head, the parliament are the ones making laws and having an actual effect.
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The parliament is majority right wing (right of this guy’s party).
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Hell yeah Portugal.
Now, pass some laws that are going to make it hard for PT MAGA to gain a foothold again.
Or don’t, and watch them come back with a vengeance next election.
Not that it matters that much as the majority of the parliament is right-leaning and the president is more of a figure for public relations than anything else.
He can refer to the Constitutional Court any legislation coming from Parliament that he thinks might be unconstitutional.
This is important because Justice in Portugal is slow as shit (really, truly, world-beating, stupidly slow) so rather than some unconstitutional shit (probably designed to make some well-connected fatcats even richer) actually coming into effect as Law and spending 10+ years fucking people’s lives whilst it gets challenged in court and works its way up to the top court of the land that then finally throws it down, it can go directly from Parliament to the President to that court before it ever affects anybody’s life.
(Having lived in Britain which has no written Constitution, I have learned to value having a Constitution as a second line of defense against political abused by parties which with a minority of cast votes have parliamentary majorities because the voting system is some undemocratic shit that does not give the same weight to all votes rather than Proportional Vote)
Personally, even though the President has flashier powers such as being able to bring down a government, I thing that this specific more technical power of referring legislation directly to the Constitutional Court before it becomes the Law in effect can be far more important in terms of impact in people’s lives, especially in this day and age when politics is pretty crooked and money-driven.
The guy who just got elected, even though he hails from one of the two mainstream parties which have dominated politics in Portugal almost since the start of Democracy in 74 and are pretty rotten, comes from a faction of that party which is actually left of center and is not connected with the crooks that led that party for that last 2 decades, so I have great hopes that he will be more consistent than the last one in using these less flashy powers to stop the kind of unconstitutional shit that screws the many for the good of a few that the neo-liberals who dominate those mainstream parties have often pushed in the last 3 or 4 decades.
You’re overstating how decisive that power really is. The President isn’t the only one (Provedor de Justiça, Prime Minister, Political Parties, etc…) who can trigger constitutional review , Parliament can override the president’s vetoes, and most harmful policies aren’t unconstitutional anyway, just political. The Court doesn’t magically prevent damage either, very often, it rules after laws are already applied. So yes, it’s a useful brake, but it doesn’t change the fact that real power in Portugal is with Parliament and the Government, not the President.
At the end of the day, the President’s main visible role is representing the country abroad and maintaining diplomatic relations, and on that level I’m glad Ventura isn’t the face of Portugal. All these headlines about a “socialist landslide over the far-right” ignore how the Portuguese system actually works: the President doesn’t govern. Parliament and the Government do, and they’re right-leaning right now.
The Iberian peninsula being incredibly based off late
It helps that millions of voters here actually grew up under fascism and still clearly remember how much it sucks.
Yeah, well, in the first round of the Presidential Elections the Fascist candidate had the 2nd largest number of votes and the one from the Hard Neoliberal Party (who in their early days wanted to privatize the National Health Service until they discovered that was incredibly unpopular) had the 3rd largest number of votes.
The Revolution was over 50 years ago and a lot of people have forgotten how things use to be or simply don’t value true Leftwing conquests like the National Health Service and Universal Education (which has been slowly undermined in the last 2 decades or so) from the short post-revolution power when Leftwing ideals were much more dominant (before things slid into the “2 main parties dominance” system that voting systems with electoral circles and no proportional vote invariably create)
I agree with everything you are saying. What I’m saying is actually living under fascism has made Portugal and Spain more resistant to fascism and other right wing non-sense than other countries in Europe. Not perfectly immune, and this will not last forever in the face of limitless digital propaganda, but for now resistant enough.
I wouldn’t be so sure.
Look at Germany, not just the obvious part with AfD but also the unwavering support for a certain middle-eastern nation dominated by an extremely racist ethno-Fascist ideology whilst they were committing Genocide in Gaza.
Given enough time that protection against a certain kind of authoritarianism because of a nation having been through it, fades away.
Given that unlike in Germany were it was foreigners that kicked the Fascists out, in Portugal it was actually the Portuguese that freed themselves of Fascism, hopefully that protection will last a bit longer in Portugal.
There is about a 50 year lag between the departure of fascism in Iberia vs Italy and Germany, it seems like they were trying to say that there are still people around who lived through it while in Germany and Italy they are all but dead.
And now PLEASE don’t fuck it up.
Don’t try crazy things, just be in power and slowly make small incremental improvements. Please don’t be a fraud, please don’t do something stupid.
I believe the reason Labour in the UK, SPD in Germany, the Democrats in the US, etc etc are so hated at this moment is not because they are “too woke”, but rather because when they have been in power, they have done nothing to help alleviate the material issues that the people face. The answer to defeat the rising fascist tide is right there for the left: do things that help the working class in their material circumstances and tell billionaires to fuck off. And yet (so far) they seem incapable of doing so. I hope for success in places like Portugal and France and then that can be a model for everyone else.
