AROUND THE WORLD
THE
WORLD
PORTUGAL
Elections challenge the left
FOR THE first time since the fall of the
Salazar dictatorship in April 1974, a rightist party gained an absolute majority of the vote in the July 19 elections. The Social Democratic Party
(PSD) headed by the premier, Cavaco
Silva, got 50.5% This result represented a major upheaval in Portuguese politics.
The PSD was able to form a minority government after the
1985 elections owing to a drop in support for the Socialist Party to 20%, which had previously oscillated between 30% and 35%.
The bulk of the lost votes went to the party of President Eanes, an officer in the Armed Forces Movement (MFA), who commanded the operations against the military opposition to the Socialist
Party government on November
25,
1975.
In the recent elections, the vote for
Eanes' party, the PRD, dropped to 5%.
The Socialist Party vote rose only slightly from 20% to 22%. But at the same time the Communist Party vote, which had long remained rather stable, dropped from 15% to 12%. The vote for the far left was approximately 2.5%, representing a slight decrease compared with the 1985 election.
Carvaco's PSD was helped in particular by two factors.
The first was Portuguese membership in the EEC. This had an important psychological and ideological impact in a country where 10% of the Portuguese-born population has emigrated to EEC countries. Moreover, as the poorest member of the EEC,
Portugal benefits proportionally more from community subsidies. Secondly, the fall in oil prices had a beneficial effect on the Portuguese economy.
In the same period, there was a decline in the activity of the working class. The
26 number of strike days
International Viewpoint • September 28, 1987 dropped. And the main union confederation, the General Confederation Portuguese Workers (CGTP), influenced by the Communist Party, showed less fighting capacity. The government's margin for maneuver was increased by the total lack of unity in action of the reformist left parties. The SP put forward a "governmental alternative" that excluded an alliance with the Communist Party. The CP, for its part, tried to decrease the weight of the SP by bringing the PRD into all anti-Cavaco nego-
The campaign of the Socialist Workers Party (PSR), the Portuguese section
Fourth International, made an impact out of all proportion to the size of the organization. In the first place, electoral laws in Portugal offer equal TV and radio time to the parties. Also, since electoral politics are new to the country, they are not so frozen and the public is not so passive as in countries where bourgeois democracy has been long established.
The PSR had used its 1985 campaign to establish relations with other political activists anxious to overcome the narrow self-affirmation and pure propaganda campaigns of the other parties. United slates were also a means of expression of concrete forms of resis-
I KNEW THE MARXIST- LENINIST COMMIE STOOGES WOULDNT BUY I... NIC ARAGUA
PEACE PLAN
tance to the restoration of capitalist "normality" in the country.
In 1987, this work led to the participation of a significant number of former leaders of revolutionary organizations on the PR's slates, especially from the Maoist current that has dominated in the Portuguese far left. Along with activists from various political backgrounds, the PSR slates included trade-unionists holding responsible positions in the CGTP, journalists, activists in the solidarity movement, and even some well-known intellectuals, such as the writer Eduarda Dioniso and the film-maker Jorge Silva Melo.
The participation in the campaign of some of the best known actors in the country, as well as the support of major writers, reinforced the image of an open, radical, militant revolutionary opposition. In the first week of the campaign, TV audience studies gave the PSR an absolute preference of 4%, exceeded only by the SP and the PSD, and equal to that of the Communist Party.
The PSR's first TV broadcast was given over to testimony by Natercia Campos, who was imprisoned for nearly two years in relation to against Otelo de Carvalho and released before that trial was finished. She was a PSR candidate, and used the campaign to expose Portugal's judicial system.
The PSR ran a bigger campaign on the ground than ever before, with innumerable rallies in factories and in the major cities. For example, PSR candidates occupied installations of the US Nicaragua. The protest was also to denounce the embassy's activities, which was one of the themes of the campaign.
With the help of journalists, the PSR
SO MUCH FOR CONGRESS.-.. ANY REACTION FROM NICARAGUA?
USSR