None of the major parties have benefited. The socialists neither enforced their reforms, nor withdrew them. They neither backed their unpopular minister nor replaced him. The conservative opposition claimed to sympathise with the student's concerns, but deplore their methods of protest. And the Communist Party had no idea how to deal with a self-organised protest movement that refused to limit itself to the interests of the party's parliamentary fraction. * *Includes material from our staff writers. Portugal "Beginning Three radical socialist groups are later this year. Fernando Batista Farnando Raticta
Under the slogan "Beginning
Again" the Bloco de Esquerda (Left Bloc) proclaims that it is time "to remake the left, and begin again. To combat the negative effects of globalisation, with its trail of misery and injustice. To struggle for a
Europe able to build a future based on the best elements of its history. A
Europe which values all its identities, be they national, class, immigrant or pluri-cultural."
Portugal, is "a country developing at different speeds... Twenty-five years after the fall of the Salazar dictatorship, modern Portugal is just as conservative as before. This cannot continue! We need to break the vicious circle of polarisation of political life between the Socialist Party and the [conservative] Social Democratic Party. there is a discourse of alternance and change, but nothing ever does change."
The project has been approved by the PSR (Portuguese section of the
Fourth International), the UDP (of
Maoist origin) and Politica XXI, a grouping of militants of different origins around a nucleus of former members of the Portuguese
Communist Party (PCP).