A victory for the right in the Portuguese general election this week could reverse the social advances of the past few years and herald a return to the “moral, theoretical and political bankruptcy” that followed the 2008 financial crisis, the leader of the small Left Bloc party has said.
Speaking to the Guardian as Portugal prepared to go to the polls on Sunday in a snap election triggered by the collapse in November of António Costa’s socialist government, Mariana Mortágua said rightwing and far-right parties did not have viable solutions to the country’s housing, healthcare and wage crises.
She also suggested hard-won social rights could be threatened, pointing out that a senior member of one of the parties that makes up the centre-right Democratic Alliance coalition had floated the idea of a new referendum on abortion, almost two decades after Portugal overturned one of Europe’s most restrictive laws.
“Today, the big news is that one of the rightwing candidates wants to have a referendum to ban free abortion in Portugal, which is something we won 17 years ago,” said Mortágua. “All that is at stake right now.”
The Democratic Alliance moved swiftly to distance itself from the idea of a new abortion referendum, but Mortágua said the coalition, led by the Social Democratic party (PSD), could not be allowed back into power because of the painful and destructive austerity policies it had inflicted on Portugal at the behest of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
“After the troika intervention and all the rightwing policies – not only here – the right entered a period of moral, theoretical and political bankruptcy,” she said.
“What’s at stake in these elections is whether we’re able to keep the right away from power and from the place where they went after the crisis, because they had no solutions to offer the country or the people, or whether they somehow manage to recover from that bankruptcy and take power again.”
The centre-right government of the PSD’s Pedro Passos Coelho was toppled in November 2015 and replaced by an anti-austerity alliance of the Socialist party (PS), the Left Bloc and the Portuguese Communist party, which was collectively known as the geringonça, or “improvised solution”.
Under Costa’s stewardship, the unlikely and little-fancied geringonça managed to bring political and economic stability to a country that received a €78bn (£67bn) bailout from the EU and the IMF in 2011.
“We did something important in 2015 and we need to keep that capacity to change the country, to have agreements on the left, and to have progressive measures,” said Mortágua.
Although the geringonça eventually foundered in 2021 when the Left Bloc and the Communist party refused to support Costa’s 2022 budget on the grounds that it did not include measures the smaller parties had asked for, Mortágua said her party was ready and willing to support a new Socialist-led government if its voice and policies were heeded.
“We’d be happy to have an agreement if that agreement means we have enough power to impose new measures for wages and the healthcare system and housing and so on,” she said.
Sunday’s election comes almost four months after Costa – who won a third term as prime minister and an unexpected absolute majority in the January 2022 general election – resigned amid an investigation into alleged illegalities in his government’s handling of large green investment projects.
Costa, who has not been accused of any crime and who maintains he has a clear conscience, said he had stepped down out of respect for his office, saying “the duties of prime minister are not compatible with any suspicion of my integrity”.
Recent polls suggest the socialists and the PSD are running almost neck and neck, with the centre-right party on about 31% of the vote and the PS on 29%. The far-right Chega party looks set to finish third with 18% of the vote, and the Left Bloc and the centre-right Liberal Initiative party are competing for fourth place with between 4% and 6% each.
The PSD’s leader, Luís Montenegro, has emphatically ruled out any agreement with Chega, saying the views and policies of its leader, André Ventura, are “often xenophobic, racist, populist and excessively demagogic”. Mortágua approves of the PSD’s decision to reject Chega, but she is sceptical as to how long it might last.
“Are we completely at peace and confident that, when the time comes and they need to get power, the right won’t find a way to make an agreement between themselves?” she said. “No. No one is.”
The Left Bloc suffered a huge collapse in the 2022 election, dropping from 19 seats in the 230-seat parliament to five, a dismal performance that Mortágua attributes to tactical voting and fears of the far-right driving her party’s voters into the arms of the socialists.
Her party may still have the clout to help the left back into office, and she is hoping that its ideas, rather than worries about Chega, will win back voters. Among its policies are using the budget surplus to increase investment in healthcare and education, ensuring that no CEO can earn more than 12 times the salary of their company’s lowest-paid worker, lowering taxes on wages and energy, and ending the non-resident tax schemes under which non-residents pay a flat tax of 10%.
The party plans to tackle Portugal’s housing crisis by banning non-residents from buying houses in cities, drastically limiting Airbnb numbers in saturated areas, and introducing rent caps and mandatory five-year rental contracts to ensure stability.
Despite the tumult of the past few years, Mortágua, a 37-year-old economist whose mother is a social worker and whose father is a veteran anti-fascist activist who fought the Salazar regime, is optimistic about the state of Portuguese democracy as the country prepares to mark the 50th anniversary of the Carnation revolution.
“If you think in international terms, when welfare states were being built, we were in a dictatorship, and we got out of dictatorship when neoliberalism was being imposed everywhere else,” she said. “Thatcher was doing her worst work ever and we were just getting out of the dictatorship and starting to build our welfare state. So we were always in kind of a countercycle, catching up to building the welfare state and democracy. But we did it and we did a great job.”
The memory of the revolution, she said, was a useful reminder of what could be done. “We need to keep working and to show people that it’s possible to fight to move forward instead of just resisting and stopping bad things from happening.
“I’m quite optimistic about this election, even if it’s against the odds. I believe in the great power of the Portuguese people.”
