06/06/2014
Ángel Rivero. Autónoma University of Madrid
The results of the elections of the past May 25th to elect the European Parliament highlighted a bulk of abstention and an increase of left and right-wings populisms. Obviously, abstention is an endemic European political problem, but the truth is that, in comparison with the past elections of 2009, participation rose slightly. Moreover, abstention is not mainly a European phenomenon, but it is a national phenomenon with European consequences. Each country of the EU behaves differently and, in particular, the most recent members of Central and Oriental Europe distort the results within the Union. Therefore, abstention is definitely high, but it is not increasing. Of course, participation is not declining, because its aggregate decrease is due to the incorporation of countries which are particularly abstainer. In the case of Portugal, participation reached 34.50%. Very low indeed, it is the lowest rate in all its history, but it is in line with its behavior in these elections. Already in the third European elections held in Portugal back in 1994, and when the country grew towards the convergence of the GDP per capita, which means in a happy and European optimistic climate, participation reached 35.54%. In fact, except for the first two European elections held in Portugal in 1987 and 1989, participation never reached 40%. In this way, we can say that there is no news related to the Portuguese political participation in these elections.
On the contrary, the growth of left and right-wing populisms generalized in all the European countries, even if the new parliament still maintain a central nucleus formed by conservatives, social democrats and classical liberals that reach little more than 60% of the Chamber. There is a difference in Western Europe between Southern and Northern countries. In the first ones, with their history of right-wing authoritarianisms, populism adopted a left-wing profile, even if in Greece also the opposite extremism grew, while in the oldest Northern European democracies, populism has a right-wing nuance. And here Portugal offers interesting news. The left-wing populism issued four deputies out of the 21 deputies that Portugal elects for the European Parliament. Among them, three are from the CDU (Coligação Democrática Unitária, initials under which the Portuguese Communist Party presents itself) electoral franchise and one from the BE (Bloco de Esquerda). Both parties integrate the Confederal Group of the European United Left - Nordic Green Left of the European Parliament. In comparison with the previous elections, communists won a seat and BE lost two. In this way, left-wing populism did not work very well in Portugal. In turn, the surprise arrived with António Marinho e Pinto, former head of Portugal’s lawyers’ association, despite his communist past in his youth, he gave a speech against corruption and with pro-European nuances, in opposition to the left-wing populism. This allowed MPT, Partido da Terra, who defines itself as centrist, ruralist and nationalist party, to obtain two seats in the European Parliament, where it enters for the first time (7.1% of the votes). Does it mean that the Portugal case is completely different from the Spanish one?
In Portugal, during these years of crisis, people made this joke: “Which is the difference between the Portuguese crisis and the Spanish crisis? …A year”. In this expression it was implicit that what happened in Portugal will finally happen in Spain, because Portugal faced what happened here some years before. Despite if reality, in the end, confirmed or refuted this sentence, this hypothesis could be applied to the changes in the Spanish party system. In Portugal, for years there were two left-wing populist parties that finally started to compete between them and which now are at a standstill, even if the Troika’s intervention was very hard for Portuguese society and this situation opened a valuable window of opportunities for them. We have now our two left-wing populist parties, at least at a European level, which are integrated within the European Parliament itself and which have practically the same percentage of aggregate vote as their Portuguese colleagues. Is the Spanish left-wing populism going to repeat the same history as the Portuguese one? We will see, but if Portugal is a year ahead from Spain, expectations of a new hegemony would finally be disproved as the history itself.
It is possible to make another comparison between the two main ruling parties. In Spain, the Popular Party won the European elections and in Portugal won the Socialist Party (SP, 8 seats, 31.4%). It is true that the first one lost many votes, so it is a relative victory. But it is important to qualify also the Portuguese Socialist Party’s victory. Some said that in Portugal the expected happens: the government lose the elections as a punishment, and consecutively the main opposite party receives support for a change. However in these elections the SP hoped to win with a larger margin in comparison with the governing coalition Aliança Portugal (PPD-PSD and CDS-PP, 7 seats, 27.1%). If this expectation was reached, then they would have the victory assured in the next legislative elections of 2015. The Portuguese SP based its expectations on the large victory that it obtained in the municipal elections of 2013. Therefore, the small victory of the European elections is somber news for its leader António José Martins Seguro: the government coalition is recovering from the end of the bailout.
Obviously, it is always risky to draw conclusions out of the comparison between countries. Even between nations that share so much, as Portugal and Spain. Nevertheless, we think it is important to take into account the Portuguese experience. We, the Spaniards, learnt much from the Portuguese democratic transition and we applied it to our own transition. Now we can also extract useful lessons. The first and most evident one is that the oxygen of populism is the economic crisis and as it starts dissipating, democratic normality returns.