The Atlantic seized yesterday the closure of the campaign in Lisbon to remind Portugal of its status as a pioneer of globalization, almost five centuries before the existence of the concept, when the small Iberian country of difficult and improbable independence build your legend as an explorer and settler of worlds. The wind and rain that came through the Tajo with the appearance of sabotaging the agenda of events carried a claim of a past that is hardly compatible with a country closed to outsiders and that discriminates against those who are different.
While in political Lisbon they did not stop the cabals and the design of conspiratorial strategies in the face of the eventual complicated scenarios that will emerge from the polls tomorrow, to strengthen the sanitary cordon against the ultra-right that has emerged in the campaign or to make it fall, the ocean sent a clear message to the Portuguese who wanted to hear it. The one of the enormous contradiction between the Portuguese national essence, that of the country that did not go further because there was no more world, and the program of the (apparently) most patriotic force, the Chega, the extreme right of the racist and xenophobe André Ventura.
“I want to trust the word of Luís Montenegro (the conservative candidate) that he will not get along with Chega if the Socialist Party (PS) comes first and can only come to power by agreeing with Ventura”, he confessed yesterday afternoon on the porches of Terreio do Paço – the Portuguese Puerta del Sol, the symbol of central power – Maria Augusta, a 21-year-old law student, PS activist who had just attended the parade and speech, at the imposing arch of the rua Augusta, of his party’s candidate, ex-minister and socialist candidate Pedro Nuno Santos. Maria was referring to Montenegro’s repeated campaign promises not to get along with Chega, despite pressure from a significant part of his party, starting with his former boss and ex-prime minister, Pedro Passos Coelho, who now appears as the advocate of the extreme right. He states, like Ventura himself, that the highest priority is to put an end to the cycle of more than eight years of socialist governments.
Despite the very clear progressive hegemony that has existed in Portugal since 2015, after the rigors of the international bailout and the at times almost colonial tutelage of the troika, discouragement is spreading in the ranks of the center-left. There is little hope of a possible reissue of the scandal, as the aforementioned coalition of the PS with the forces to its left, the Bloc and the PCP, is known, which the now resigned Socialist Prime Minister António Costa pulled out of the then prodigious sleeve This demoralization is perceived in the construction of the scenario of what is beginning to be known as tripolar Portugal. In front of the bipolar of the two blocks, created precisely by Costa, the one on the center left and the one on the right, on the tripolar there is a blocked road, the one on the extreme right. So, socialist aspirations imply being first and that conservative Montenegro let them rule. Even candidate Santos has calculated that, if the PS and its left-wing allies exceed the sum of conservatives and liberals, with the ultra-right on the sidelines, there could be a progressive government. If the first scenario is already complicated, even if the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, of the conservative faction opposed to the ultras, is in favor, the second is close to the chimera.
Even with the enormous disrepute of the polls in Portugal, which have been stringing together ridiculous ones for the last five years, in the end they mark the agenda and draw the scenarios, like an inexcusable ritual, amplified by the media. The serious, concerned faces of the two major parties, the conservative and the socialist, more so in the latter than in the former, and the euphoric position of the far-right reflect polls that politicians malign and people mock for Street.
Yes, there is a point of mistrust, because it is not difficult to find those who believe in an increasingly less likely result in demoscopy, that of the first socialists, as would be logical if the ultra-right grows as much as it says, since it cuts off the space of conservatives . But these are variations on questionable forecasts.
“It will all be very little, but we will win”, said yesterday at noon in the Alvalade neighborhood, after an event in Montenegro, a retiree who proudly wore the PSD badge on his chest. If Montenegro comes first and has a right-wing majority, it will have a clear path, since Santos has promised to let it govern. It is the easy part of the health care cordon on the far right. The difficult part is this hypothetical first socialist square in a Portugal turned to the right. This would be the great test bed of whether the ultra-right can be stopped at the border of Europe, in Lisbon, which was several times the door to the universe.
