The Socialist Party won the elections. By few or many, he won. And its leader should be congratulated for that.
Pedro Nuno Santos, elected just over six months ago to hold the line after a vile attack on António Costa’s government, has been faced with political obligations for which he had neither the time nor the way to prepare.
The legislative elections he tied, the two campaigns in Madeira in the Azores, in which he committed himself when he could have remained in the shadows, created the feeling that these European campaigns could be decisive for his leadership. Social communication generated an almost inevitability of victory that actually happened.
The PS is a very mature party with internal functioning very different from the PSD. Its leaders, who reached the head of the government, left on their own and those who were unable to govern left due to the perception that two Presidents of the Republic, also from the PS, had that they could not they had sufficient connection with the country.
In the role there is still a leadership that fell into a very participatory and tough internal process, a leadership that also won elections, local and European, but that had also lost connection with the country and with the internal bases of representation.
Now, Pedro Nuno Santos only has a short time in office to be told that he is facing any of the aforementioned situations. Socialists do not play on permanent conspiracy boards, especially because there are almost no conspirators left.
The Socialist Party won the elections. Pedro Nuno won, Mário Soares won and António Costa won.
Soares because he built the idea of Europe clinging to the PS; Costa because in these elections he was also an element of the equation, as anyone who analyzed the campaigns saw clearly. We must, therefore, in the days ahead, transform his choice as President of the European Council into a second victory for Portuguese socialists.
Lastly the list. The PS had three list leaders, but the person who was in the permanent campaign was the party leader. The reasons for such exposure were already identified above.
Anyone who, for the first time and after 40 years of direct political activity, followed these elections from the outside, can clearly say that notoriety is not inevitably credibility for a given role and that the absence of a sustained political culture , added to excessive voluntarism, didn’t help either.
Pedro Nuno Santos indicated in his victory speech that new General States will be followed to open the PS to society. This is my new concern.
There are marks that, if we cannot resolve them with the States General, are within us and we either dissipate them or, in the long run, they end with us.
The first mark is the one on the left in unitary view. There has never been in Portugal, nor in Europe, a single left. However, in this campaign what we saw was an almost collage of the ideas of the PS and those of Livre and BE. This resulted in the consolidation of the tendency for the parties of the ultraconservative left, the fixist left and the new unipersonal left to reduce electorally by promoting a transfer of votes to the PS. And here is the danger. The positioning of the PS, the furthest to the left of all time, causes it to lose its center and leads to a long period of removal from power. Now, Pedro Nuno Santos is not leader of the PS to occupy Rato’s seat, but to continue what was built in the last incarnations of government.
The PS cannot shout from the rooftops that democracy is at stake, when it is not; the PS cannot confuse or combine the center-right with the ultra-right because they are not the same thing; the PS cannot use the Salazarist jargon of us and them, because it makes the debate illiterate; the PS cannot focus its message solely on the poorest, because their existence is already our first obligation; the PS cannot highlight a certain neo-Marxist vision that seems to be evident in the way it looks at the economy and society; the PS cannot have a speech based on a kind of scolding for those listening at home, because the millions of voters only judge the parties through television; the PS cannot be the party where there seems to be no minimum consideration, because there is no sense of a structured course of action; the PS cannot be the movement where many protagonists deny the quality and beauty of the Portuguese language to convince and ignore the simple words of adages to find the ears on the other side. The PS, in short, cannot be the loudmouth party with a quick, impenetrable speech that does not meet the eyes and smiles of those at home. This is the good and great task that Pedro Nuno has ahead of him.
Carmo Afonso had, this week, a moment of great lucidity in a article which went to press in Público. He spoke of the decline of the Bloco de Esquerda and the PCP, but the address went further – Largo do Rato, 2 – Lisbon.
The Portuguese electorate has abandoned the class struggle, no one claims to be a worker, almost everyone is from the middle class, even those who receive subsidies reject the imaginary consideration of being poor or unprotected. All of this is really decisive.
If the PS chooses to be just the great party of those below and deny the energy, the imagination and the future of those who want to be someone in life, then there will be no States General that are worth it. That’s why Pedro Nuno’s job is not just to prepare the PS to win the local and presidential elections, it’s to have the humility to understand Carmo Afonso, abandon the two or three cuckoos who want to rule the PS without being from the PS and they speak to him through statistics, to once again have a true ambition as a leader who rejects being a caliber.
If he wants, there are many people with ideas and knowledge of the country and the party who will come with him.
