Finland’s results in the European election bucked a continent-wide trend of rising support for parties on the outer fringe of right-wing politics, with the Left Alliance and the National Coalition winning big at the expense of the nationalist Finns Party.
Leftist leader Li Andersson received more votes than any other candidate has ever received in a European election.
This warms my hearth.
I’m actual a member of a small leftwing party in my own country and (having lived 2 decades abroad and seen other political realities and even been a member of the Green Party in Britain) have concluded they suffer exactly from the problem that well entrenched leadership are not “straight shooters calling bullshit out”, and instead their style of discourse “avoids giving offense”, sounding far too much (IMHO) like the mainstream supposedly-left party we have here and leaving an impression about the party (to those who aren’t tribalists predisposed to support and believe in anything the party’s leadership says) that they’re just another group looking to suckle from the tit of the state.
I think the problem in my party is due to the leadership being a very uniform group of 30-something well-off scions of the Middle Class (which, in a country that until the revolution of 74 that overthrew Fascism had very little Middle class, shows that they’re hardly coming “from the people”) who got to the leadership mainly due to nepotism (often being the sons and daughters of party founders) or by going to the same shcools and being similar to each other and talking the same talk as the rest - i.e. cronysm - and who, from the explanations I got from one of the party’s members of parliament for certain anti-Democratic practices inside the party, see themselves as superior to the rest of the members of the party (which probably explains why they listen - if at all - very little to the rest of the party and seem unable to change even after losing between half and two thirds of the vote).
So I hope I can use the example of the Left in Finland to internally push for a kind of change in leadership and discourse, towards one much more broadly representative of people in this country and who is willing to talk about how parts of the machine are broken and need replacing (and do so anchored on a proactivelly tought through vision for the future, rather than the mere reactivelly “complain about things blowing up after they blew up” so common in my country) rather than the current mild-mannered, frustrating reactive discourse that amounts to little more than “the car is fine, it’s just some some screws that need tightenning”.
I want to highlight that Andersson is still respectful and not offensive. The callouts are done honestly
Totally agree that leftism in a global sense needs to shift communication towards a more active and hopeful future. Everyone else is just sticking to the status quo or worse.
I’ll give you an example:
I would like to see more pointing out that most members of Parliament, government ministers and heads of city halls from the two main parties are also “housing investors” so it makes absolute sense that they voted for all kinds of measures over the last decade that pumped up even higher the gigantic house bubble in Portugal, which is making young people in Portugal stay with their parent’s until their mid 30s and, in a country with one of the most aged populations in Europe, delaying childbirth and having fewers children, and even to leave the country by their hundreds of thousands each year.
Instead all we get is something around “house prices are too high that’s bad for the young” and only started getting it recently when even the Middle Class started hurting - I mean, the guys at the mainstream parties also say that at this point because it’s got the a level were it’s well beyond undeniable. I mean, I moved back to Portugal 5 years ago from the UK and it was already painfully obvious to me that there as a massive housing bubble and the politicians in power were passing measures to pump it up even further and faster.
Similarly the non-mainstream Left seldom talks about Corruption and the systemic structural reasons for it (from a Judicial system which is slow, underinvested in and partly subverted by the dominant political parties, to a widespread nationwide culture of Nepotism and Cronyism), not least because the party with the biggest problem in that domain at the moment is the supposedly leftwing mainstream one with whom these parties aimed to make a cohalition in the last Parliamentary elections. Refraining from overtly and unwavering standing by the principle that politicians abusing the powers they’ve been delegated to by voters in unacceptable no matter the party of those politicians at the time when the far-right was (with tremendous hypocrisy) was making a lot of noise about it, just made those leftwing parties look like either accomplices, unprincipled and/or just looking to feed of the tit of the state like the rest.
(It also doesn’t help that in my experience those leftwing parties also internally suffer massivelly from Cronyism and Nepotism)
IMHO to be a proper leftwing party you don’t really need to go around calling other people assholes, you just need to point out that many if not most of the greatest problems that affect all society weren’t born from immaculate conception: they are the result of choices and actions for personal gain of people entrusted by voters with powers that can impact everybody else. Merelly “This is bad and needs changing” from the mouths of a politician with no pointing of fingers doesn’t mean much because they all say that when things get to the point of being undeniable, even the very same politicians that caused that problem in the first place and such stuff only real works for tribalists who are already convinced that “the leaders of my Party are trustworthy and it’s those other people who are not” (which has the curious effect of making most party members thinks those speeches are amazing and insightful when comming from those they see as they leaders, without noticing the deep similarity with what is said by the leaders of other parties, even while outsiders and non-tribalists are hearing everybody saying the same stuff and thus not trusting any one group more than another and even thinking “they’re all the same”).
Let me guess, Portugal and Livre?
No.
Livre are Liberals cosplaying as Lefties.
In a genuine fight for Equality you don’t go around segregating people by identities and deeming some more deserving to fight for than others because of the identity you think that they belong to: you fight for everybody who is being treated unfairly, ideally going after that which is causing greatest pain first.
Split people by the genetics they were born with and treating them differently based on that is not the path to Equality and Fairness, it’s just a different kind of Inequality and Unfairness, so those doing such dividing and segregated treatment are either fighting for something else - say, “everybody should be free to do what they want with consenting adults”, which is fine, but at times incompatible with the core leftwing principle of “the best possible life for the greatest number”, especially when it comes to money (were the latter principle would go against the Freedom of some to accumulate as much wealth as they want), so that’s not Leftwing, that’s just Liberalism - or they’re tribalist fad followers, who don’t think when it comes to politics.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Livre end up turning out to be just as much a bunch of self-serving assholes seeking “jobs for the boys” by ridding a fashionable political strain imported from elsewhere as Portugal’s newest “Green Party” cosplayers, PAN, turned out to be.
I’ll read your comment in more detail later but who were you talking about then?
O Bloco.
If you look at the leadership they’re incredibly uniform (almost all 30-somethings, from well off origins, either there because mommy or daddy were middle class leftwingers during the Fascist days - which I can respect, whilst at the same time thinking says nothing about their childrens’ qualities or values - or because they’re mates with such people). Unsurprisingly they all sound like betinhos (soft spoken middle-class types constantly signaling their social status in language, dress and manners) and do not at all come across as competent or even with any breadth of life experience (plenty never experienced or did anything other than Politics, a characteristic they share with people of the same age in the two mainstream political parties).
I mean, it’s fine to be like that, it’s just not fine when a politicial party which is supposed to fight for and represent all kinds of people is so narrow in the original social strata, age, life experience and universities frequented (including actually having frequented one) of those who lead it, and hence their way of thinking and the kind of things they’re aware of, not to mention that highly uniform social environments are invariably the result of people selecting each other by similarity and friendship (i.e. cronyism) not merit, since merit comes in all shapes, forms, genders, ages and origins and hence selection by it naturally yields a lot more variety in a group.
(There are a ton of blindspots for any group of people who are highly uniform and that problem due to the uniformity in the leadership of the Block has been easilly exploited by the mainstream “leftwing” party and even the far right in Portugal in the last 2 elections)
As somebody who spent his young adult years in The Netherlands, I have very different values in terms of openness and much stricter Democratic expectations than the shit that dominates the party, were I’ve seen my share of systematic undemocratic behaviours and treating mechanisms meant for free and democratic choice including actual votes as nothing more than “formalities”. Also, having lived and been in politics in Britain I have a keen ability to detect the parroting of the performative “leftwing” ideas from the fake leftwing wing parties there (LibDems, New Labour, equivalent to the Democrats in the US) which oh-so-often seems to be repeated by local lefties who being too unwordly to understand the context and trying to follow the fashion of the “left” in those countries, parrot neoliberal stuff they read in English-language social media.
It’s very frustrating because I originally thought they were a thinking Left.
I’m not sure I agree
For one Bloco’s majority of votes comes from exactly the opposite of what you say they are. I.e. lower class and less educated people.
I don’t think they have the image of being “betinhos”, quite the opposite. Majority of Betos vote IL, Agrobetos somehow vote chega, and betos who lean left and actually care about social issues now vote Livre. Some of them also voted PAN but fortunately less and less.
The view I have of Bloco is that they are more on the woke warrior side and a bit too much sometimes. The whole, I am more knowledgeable than you is very present in IL and in a way also in Rui Tavares.
Catarina Martins is one of the more empathetic politicians we have in Portugal atm. The Mortagua sisters may have a well off background but they have proven their work countless times and many times outside of Bloco. Marisa Matias and José Gusmão are both almost 50 and no where close to your description of “elite”.
But I guess your opinion is just as valid. For what it’s worth I actually joined them very recently but so far haven’t seen much of anything (apart from disorganization).
Maybe it was all those years outside of Portugal, but in my mind “betinhos” isn’t just a certain young wannabe (or even outright) rich person (the outright being common in places like Cascais) but is more generically a middle class person from a middle class background who heavilly signals their well-off status - they’re indeed two different kinds, but when it comes to the way they talk they have quite similar styles and run around with an elitist belief that they know better. Maybe it’s my working class background (even though I do have a degree and am supposedly middle class myself nowadays) or some kind of hyper-sensitivity to class status signalling from having lived in the UK, but for me the well-off leftwing soft “rebels” from well-off families who behave towards working class party members in a paternalistic way are from the same branch of the tree as the other kind even though they’ve taken a turn to the left rather than the right.
It does make sense that the “betinhos” from the wannabe rich in the sense you seem to be thinking about vote IL since that party sells an idea of meritocracy (entirelly fake as I can tell you from having worked in the industry from were most of those “gentlemen” from IL come - Finance) which would appeal to the “not yet rich who want to believe they’ll get there if they try to emulate what they think are the rich hard enough”. Curiously from what I’ve seen when manning voting boots in Cascais for the Bloco a few elections ago, the real deal upper class “betinhos” probably vote CDS.
I’ve been a member of the Bloco for 4 years now, in 2 different districts and whilst I spent most of the time in the first couple of years with a “all I know is that I know nothing” posture of watching and learning, I did pay a lot of attention and used a couple of decades of experience gained abroad (in various kinds of companies and various countries) in figuring out new environments, observing how things work between people and even winding people up just to get them to say what they really think, and have seen and heard a lot of elitist and even outright anti-Democratic posture in the Bloco, including from sitting Parliamentary Members I know personnally (I’ve also seen good things here and there and don’t actually think most people there have bad intentions, they’re mainly out of ignorance and lack of self-awareness behaving in ways that are elitist, self-serving - not in a greedy way but in an interpret things in ways that avoid accepting that they too sometimes are *gasp* wrong - really reactive, inconsistent and lacking a broader vision, and even with ouright anti-Democratic behaviours).
I’ve also seen some ridiculous fake leftie stuff from the membership: in one congress I went to most of the speeches from members were of the “we the [some group] want/need X, Y, Z”, which is my eyes is just greed disguised as “for the group”, whilst the “for the common good” kind of stuff (or at least the stuff worring about groups other than those one is in) were a lot less than what I (naivelly?) expected in a congress of a real Leftwing Party.
I don’t know about the class of the voters of the Bloco, all I know is that the leadership of the party at the highest level are all degree-holding people and even the District leadership in the District I live in which contains large blue collar areas and hence an unusally high number of blue collar worker members (still a minority), only a tiny handful of the District Leadership are blue collar.
Maybe it’s a wider Portuguese phenomenon, but the tendency of many Middle Class people to think they know better even in subjects they know nothing about and use haughty dialetics to basically bully the less well educated or just ignoring them whilst faking listenning to them rather than really listenning and taking it in what a Working Class person says, even on subjects that the Working Class person does not better, is alive and well in the Bloco, were IMHO I think it’s unnacceptable (acceptable in the pro-Elite rightwing, not in a supposedly pro-everybody leftwing party).
This social blindness manifests in some ridiculous ways sometimes: I remember one election where the national leadership (who, by the way, don’t seem to listen to anybody else that people from Lisbon and Porto, to the point that councils in the same district felt ignored) sent us a black middle class woman to go campaigning in a poor neigbourhood which had lots of people who were born in Africa and became Portuguese nationals or their children, and she behaved incredibly “middle class woman” with this kind of bland “we understand your problem” talk whilst not really properly empathising with the concerns of those people, whilst the person amongst us really empathising (mainly by getting progressivelly angry at the shit that was being done to them) and coming up with ways to try and help them within the power of a party that had all of one seat in the local assembly was a local guy who didn’t at all look like them but had been in some pretty bad State highschools whilst growing up and really knew how life could be for somebody from such neighbourhoods.
(The funny bit was that the lady herself once elected was pretty decent as member of Parliament, she just wasn’t at all representative of the people those who put her forward for meeting and seemingly represent, with quite extraordinary socially-blindness only seemed to see as “ethnics” hence they “matched them by ethnicity” - you need to be incredibly socially-deluded to see poor people and think what matters the most is their skin color).
For me the collapse of the vote on the Bloco in the last couple of years as the mainstream parties started falling (which one would expect was a prime time for a leftwing alternative voice to gain votes) did not surprise me in the least given all that I saw from the inside including some interesting talks with my local member of Parliament once I moved to a District capital.
Maybe the party can be pushed and prodded to become more like this Finnish party seems to be, though judging by how self-isolated, elitist and Party-Headquarters centric the current leadership are and how little they listen to the rest (except when an election comes and they need people to go around campaigning, which is when they suddenly remember to tour the “countryside” and talk to the members, though even those “listening” tours are very much in a “important people and little people” structure rather than “open discussion”) I don’t think it will happen without the old guard - who were the ones who chose to give way to this handpicked “new generation” - cut their legs off.
Why are you still a member? It seems like you aren’t having a good time.
I haven’t totally lost hope yet.
Also it’s not like most people in the party don’t have good intentions, it’s mostly a problem of ineptitude, the unfortunate Portuguese tendency to “make it up as you go” and not being quite as strict as I am when it comes to Democratic principles of free and fair choice, openness and the nature of being a representative for others.
A broadenning of the kinds of people that end up leading the party and a replacing of the culture of self-deluded ignorant elitism at the top with one of openness might shift the politics of the party into a more aware and hence more representative and even more competent track.
If there is one thing I’ve concluded from my experience of living in multiple countries and even being involved in politics in some is that variety and some amount of flux are the best things to have in Democracy: it’s when people sit too long in places of power and surround themselves with others like them (or, worse, Yes men) that you get problems - there is no leadership that doesn’t turn to shit once it’s had a decade or two constantly at the top.
(Note that in this party at the moment the leadership is not a person, it’s a group. This was especially true during the time of Catarina who internally was very open and clear about only wanting to be a spokesperson, not “the boss”).
I very much doubt the culture of cronyism can be replaced by something more meritocratic (as that’s a general problem in Portuguese society rather than specific to that party), but merelly variety will at least lead to more ways of thinking about and approaching everything because more varied backgrouns bring more varied outlooks and approaches to figuring out how to achieve the kind of society people in that party generally want to have (even if they seldom know how to even start to get there).