Presidential elections ag to go show surprise victory th for Soares da
CO to br
IT WAS undoubtedly the engagement by the left against the righttic wing candidacy of Freitas do Amaral between the two rounds of the le:
at election which guaranteed Mario Soares' victory in the presidential
W] elections.
pr
After the first round, which took place on January 26, the margin el
PS in favour of the right-wing candidate was large with a 46.3% majority
It as against 26% for Mario Soares, the runner up. (1) In the second sh round, which took place in mid-February, the results were reversed th da and Mario Soares got 51.35% of the votes cast.
in
His electoral victory is thus clearly the result of a mobilisation of left voters at a time when most political commentators were claiming a victory for Amaral.
TI th
FRANCISCO LOUCA
The campaign for the presidential elections constituted an important event in Portuguese political life. Already for several years the problem of a successor to Ramalho Eanes had been seen as an essential factor in the political stability of the country. Eanes was the general who commanded the troops at the time of the November 25, 1975 coup d' etat and, having already served two terms as president, was constitutionally barred from serving a third.
It was a long wait and the election campaign had, in reality, been launched months before. Mario Soares was the first candidate to enter the lists. As prime minister for most of 1985, and leader of the Portuguese Socialist Party [PS], until the parliamentary elections on October 6, 1985, he led the coalition government with the main bourgeois party, the Social Democratic Party (PSD), wielding a large parliamentary majority. His plan had openly been to stand in the presidential elections as the candidate of the PS and the PSD, and this plan was backed by the main bourgeois political leaders and advisers to the US embassy.
In order to get the support of the bourgeois parties for his candidacy, Soares also got the PS involved in the construction of electoral pacts with the PSD and the CDS (Right Christian Party), which represented about 10 per cent of the electorate, during the municipal elections last December. The aim of this was to th dislodge the Portuguese Communist
Party (PCP) from the town halls tr where they were dominant. In general
01 these electoral coalitions did not ar achieve their objective.
th
During the last year two factors
Sc had combined to disrupt Soares'
Pi plans.
ar
First, popular opposition to the austerity measures imposed by the
01 government. Even if this was not translated into huge struggles this period nevertheless saw the beginnings of a generalised sentiment of
01 discontent that was expressed clearly tv in the October 6 general elections
1 when the PS vote declined from
36% to 20% of the votes cast. (2)
SU
E
A rush of scandals like the one over delayed payment of wages when some firms were refusing to pay li their workers even though they were still working, also contributed to the fall in popularity of the PS-PSD coalition government.
The second factor, which brought the general elections forward to
October, was the internal crisis of the second party in the government coalition, the PSD. As a party of the
Apart from the three candidates of the left mentioned in this article, the
PCP did originally field a candidate, a member of their Central Committee, Angelo
Beloso. At the beginning of the election campaign the latter announced his intention to stand down in favour of Zenha in the first round. Zenha was considered by the PCP as "the only democratic candidate who would fight the right"
See International Viewpoint' No.
89, December 23, 1985.
International Viewpoint 24 March 1986
bourgeoisie since April 25, 1974, the PSD now saw a revolt of its base against its marginalisation in relation to the PS, both within the coalition government itself and in the framework of Mario Soares' candidacy for the presidency.
The death of the PSD president, who supported Mario Soares' candidacy, opened the way for the discontent within the PSD to come to the surface. The party congress brought a change in the composition of the leadership. The new leadership of the PSD broke immediately with the coalition government which tied it to the PS, and this provoked the calling of the general elections on October 6, in which the PSD got 36 per cent of the votes. It was the advent of this new leadership of the PS which brought about the appearance of a bourgeois candidate competing with Mario Soares in the presidential elections and this was the Christian Democrat, Freitas do Amaral. The candidates of the left
The first round of the presidential elections in January 1986 was a triumph for the united candidate of the right, Freitas, who mustered an absolute majority of 46.3%. For the left there were three candidates — Soares, Salgado Zenha and Lourdes Pintasilgo and they were fighting amongst themselves for the chance to participate in the second round of the elections in which only the two top candidates would stand.
Salgado Zenha, was, until the eve of the elections, still a member, of the PS and was Soares' number two before he broke with him in 1980. This was good enough reason for him to get the simultaneous support of the PCP and General Eanes, who were both seeking to undermine Soares' role in the political life of the country.
The third candidate, Lourdes Pintasilgo, has had a more checkered political career. She was a functionary in the diplomatic corps in the last year of the dictatorship, involved in confidential work for the government, notably in the United Nations where she scrupulously followed the policy of the regime.
On April 25, 1974, she was to be found amongst the new democrats and President Eanes nominated her as prime minister in 1979 for a short period. Since then she has been tied in with small left-wing Catholic groups.
When in government she established certain basic rights for women, and she uses pacifist rhetoric and is vaguely
International Viewpoint 24 March 1986 critical of NATO and the EEC (European Economic Community). She was very popular at the end of the 1970s, to the extent that the opinion polls were tipping her as the favourite for the presidential elections.
She was also clearly the favourite of militants and voters supporting the PCP and among Eanes supporters, the latter having recently set up a political party, the Party of Democratic Renewal (PRD) which got 18% of the votes in the general elections in October 1985. Pintasilgo's success is tied in with her extraordinary capacity to draw the sympathy of large sections of the electorate, unhappy with the political institutions, with the functioning of the regime and with the social crisis.
Despite the fact that Pintasilgo supports the current system and the options available within that framework (defence of private property, the church etc) the radical nature of her political rhetoric led sections of the far left to support her. This created certain difficulties also for the PCP leadership in convineing their electorate to vote for Salgado Zenha, the candidate officially supported by the PCP in the first round.
In every case the candidacies of the left constituted a challenge to the tradition of the revolution of the carnations. Ranged against the right-wing candidate, Freitas, the heir apparent of the former dictator, were three candidates who had either been involved in compromise with the dictatorship like Pintasilgo or had tried to create consensus in the name of the struggle against anarchopopulism, against revolutionary initiatives in the period opened up by April 25 and for the political stabilisation of the regime.
Soares and Zenha, both champions of the current regime of which the PS was a cornerstone, waged a campaign against extremism of the left and right" , putting forward vague promises
Mario Soares (DR) for "democratizing public life"
Slightly ahead of Zenha and Pintasilgo in the first round, Soares found himself with 26% of the vote as against 46.3% for the right-wing candidate. The PCP then called for a vote for Soares in the second round. It was the massive left vote in the second round which, with a unanimity that was not forseen a few months earlier, brought him his final victory.
This result has to be seen fundamentally as a vote to stop Freitas from winning The popular masses feared that a victory for Freitas would deepen tne policy of attacks on democratic rights and the offensive against the workers. This explains the explosion of popular joy on the evening of the announcement of the results, in which all the left parties were involved.
Soares victory will not prevent the PSD government from carrying out its functions. According to the Portuguese constitution, it is the government which controls most political functions and can therefore govern without much interference from the president (unlike in France, for example. The defeat of the right is thus more important on the political and psychological level than in terms of the real capacity of the government to act. It is nevertheless a sufficiently important factor to create certain internal tensions within the bloc supporting the government and it will give greater encouragement to sections of workers to struggle against, for example, the austerity measures which they have hitherto tolerated.
The successive elections in recent months - the legislative elections in October 1985, the municipal elections in December 1985 and the two rounds in the presidential elections in January and February 1986reveal a series of political contradictions which we will quickly run through.
9
Free Otelo Carvalho IN JULY, 1984, along with several dozen members of his party, the United Popular Forces (FUP), Otelo Carvalho was imprisoned in Caxias. The prison has sinister memories since it was used for political prisoners under the dictatorship as well. Carvalho is still in jail and it is expected that he could remain there for some time.
The trial in the "case of the FP-25" began about six months ago. (1) But up to now only three of the accused have been heard and there are about 40 more, with over 700 witnesses.
The slowness of the procedure is in itself illustrative of the way in which the judicial system operates. Several observers, jurists and defence lawyers have seen fit to denounce the judicial procedure as stemming from a police-organised plot with very precise political motives. It represented an attempt to undermine the influence of an important figure who retained popularity because of his role in the "revolution of the carnations". The underlying aim of the operation seems more probably to rest in a campaign for the adoption of a new law on security destined to usher in a new organised political police which, legally at any rate, has not existed since April 25, 1974. To back up this theory there exists the heavy police infiltration of the terrorist organisation, FP-25 which has been confirmed by the recent actions perpetrated by this organisation. These activities have contrived to prejudice the defence case or to present the right in a favourable light as with the assassination, on the eve of the second round of the presidential elections, of the director general of prisons.
Because of the confused nature of the situation, made worse by the portrayal of the ex-leaders of the FUP as police provocateurs and because of the defence argument that there was a plan to create an armed wing but that it had not yet been put into action, the solidarity movement and the fight against repression is extremely underdeveloped inside the country. It has even developed in other countries, like Greece, however.
Carvalho has now been held for one year and a half without any decision being made or any real evidence being brought forward and it is becoming urgent to build a protest movement against police repression and for his release.
1. The Popular Forces of April 25 (FP-25) is the terrorist organisation which Otelo direction which went from a government and electoral alliance with the parties of the right (the price of which was the loss of votes in the October and December 1985 elections) to an appeal for a vote for the left, against the conservative candidate and his fascist past", , during the presidential elections. The fact that this change in direction had the desired effect sheds a lot of light on the contradictions that the PS faces and on its links with the working class.
But the most important thing to understand now is that the victory of Soares has enabled him to whitewash the record of the government under his leadership in relation to alliances with the right, the austerity policies and the corrupt system of patronage. For revolutionaries who fight for the emergence of a political alternative to the. reformist parties this is the fundamental issue which confronts them after the presidential elections, now that the candidate of the right is defeated, a fact which they can only applaud.
The final question which has to be raised relates to the debate opened up amongst an important section of the mass movement about the clear failure of the policies of the PCP which they have been engaged in since 1980 and which aimed to promote 1980 and which aimed to promote General Eanes' party and to undermine the influence of the PS. This strategy did not prevent Soares from getting into the second round of the presidential elections as the representative of the left. The PCP leadership, to a large degree because of its anti-fascist reflexes stemming from its history, was forced to call a four-day extraordinary congress in order to change its previous orientation which prohibited any vote for Soares and they eventually called for a vote against the right in the second round.
The PCP now calls for the establishment of a government of the left, a policy which it will rapidly abandon to return to one of exposing the Soares leadership. This means that today, as compared with previous years, the PCP is finding itself with no real goal outside of the psychology of the "beleaguered fortress", , which by definition is a defensive and fragile position. Any analysis of the failure of its orientation, of its sectarianism and its sharp turns in direction, will be an important element in the development of the political debate within a significant section of the workers' movement.
3. The current electoral law established a system of proportional representation by district on the basis of electoral lists. All the lists are entitled to equal access to all forms of communication including television and radio, during the election campaign. International Viewpoint 24 March 1986 is accused of belonging to.
The first point relates to the development of two distinct patterns which, on the electora! level, give us important indications as to the political structure of the country.
The first of these movements tends to predominate in periods of greater political stability when, for example, the government consisted of the PS-PSD alliance or when these two parties were alternating in government. This trend is characterised by a very slow homogenisation of the electorate at a national level, under the banners of the main parties of the left and the right. This was marked by the growth of the PCP in the rural areas of the North where it is usually weaker and of the PSD vote in the urbanised South. It was also expressed in the process of industrialisation and growing unionisation in the North of the country along with increasing vacillation on the part of important sectors of the petty bourgeoisie and urban population between the PS and the PSD.
The second pattern we can see appears in times of great instability and political confrontation. Despite everything, it usually shows a continuing division between the areas where the left and right predominate.
But the second problem stems from the crisis of political leadership of the bourgeoisie which this presidential election has highlighted. The PSD and the CDS with their presidential candi10 date (and even during the time when they supported Mario Soares) were proposing to change the electoral law in order to guarantee parliamentary stability and hence, governmental stability. (3) At the same time the new law on security, to which the prelude was the arrest and imprisonment of Otelo Carvalho (see box) 'will establish more rigorous and repressive norms of operation than those which were formally in place under the dictatorship. And what is already at stake is the construction of a political police.
It is obvious that the election of Soares and the support which he finally obtained from the PCP against the right-wing candidate has rather disrupted these plans. Nevertheless to the extent that the workers' move. ment remains subordinate to certain bourgeois figures for whom compromise with these plans is always possible, it will have very little power to intervene in the debates concerning democratic rights and the electoral system.
The third issue raised by the cycle of elections relates to the mindboggling decline in the PS vote in October 1985 (from 36% to 20%) and its subsequent rise in February 1986 with the victory in the presidential elections. The symbol of the phoenix rising from the ashes has been very useful to the social democrats even at the cost of a change in political