01/10/2013
Juan Carlos Jimenez Redondo, San Pablo CEU University
Pedro Passos Coelho's arrival in office took place after the failure of the socialist government led by José Socrates. The country's chaotic financial situation forced the then prime minister to resign in 2010 after parliament rejected his fourth austerity plan. The government immediately applied to the European Union and the International Monetary Fund for the bailout of an economy on the brink of default. Since then, the country is living in a factual situation of financial control by both institutions, leaving the Portuguese government as a mere executor of a scathing budget adjustment program.
The description of the situation allows us to infer two essential elements. The first refers to the government's inability to rule in an effective way. The second refers to the idea of a certainly vicious situation repeating itself. That is, a socialist government that uses public spending as a legitimising factor, stretching it until it caused a state of near default, and the obligation of the conservative government to implement such a severe policy that it ends up being a victim of it, both by the objective effects that these cuts create, and the weakness when delivering a credible case against the more demagogic, but certainly more popular, case used by the political left that denounces these cuts. A speech which uses as a recurrent topic the accusation of the "right" using the crisis to implement a strategy to dismantle the Welfare State.
It is clearly a short and medium term strategy to illegitimatise the liberal-conservative governments, and a tool to a political and ideological radicalisation as shown by the election results, which show a remarkable growth of the communists and those who run as independents, i.e. outside the classical party system.
Any solution? Only delivering a strong speech in ideological terms, something that the Portuguese government has failed to do up to now, anchored as it is in a justifying and purely defensive one instead.