There’s the Portuguese government, mostly left wing for a long time and they’ve plunged us into an economical crisis and are ready to do it again. But they still are in power because the old folk doesn’t want to vote for anything they haven’t for the past century.
We’re talking about the guys who are usually talking about “doing what’s good for businesses”, have spent 3 billion euros saving a failing private company (TAP, the airline) and now want to fully privatise it (which will yield less than half of that amount), over they years rigged the housing market in multiple ways to pump up a massive house price bubble (which now causes half the portuguese who get degrees to emigrate) and have cut funding for the National Health Service so hard that medical doctor have been leaving it in such large numbers that pregnancy services and ever emergency services are now regularly (and irregularly) closing in hospitals all over the country.
And don’t get me started on how big they are on subsiding well-connected companies and closing their eyes to their fiscal evasion (not just avoidance, actual evasion) like when the privatise electricity company sold a bunch of hydrogeneration dams without paying any of the due tax on the sale.
These guys are exactly the “centrists” being pointed out here, or in other words they’re neoliberals (hence the obcession with unconditional “supporting businesses” and privatisation) and they’re not even left of center by traditional political thinking (only in this day and age of an Overtoon Window so shifted to the right by late stage capitalism that “business supporting” and “privatising” are considered leftwing activities by the ignorant).
Unsurprisingly they and another party pretty much have a power duopoly and have held power together for almost 5 decades, making Portugal the shithole it is.
Nah, the say of themselves as “leftwing” all the the while pursuing mainly a rightwing ideology in pretty much everything, most notably things like supporting any and all businesses (without a “only the ones positive for society” restriction), privatisation, lowering of regulation (most noteably by simply not applying the laws in the books) and so on.
I mean the only meaningful left-of-center policy they had in the last decade was raising the minimum wage, and that was more than offset by their treatment of the housing market as an “investment asset class” and pumping with several price-influencing measures (from given Golden Visas for 500k “investments in houses” and refusal to build public housing - in the country of Europe with the least public housing - to a very liberal attitude on turning housing into AirBnBs - which recently was found unconstitutional by the supreme court) a massive house price bubble that ate that minimum salary raise and then some (houses have been up about 12% a year, faster than even that minimum salary raise and way faster than average salary growth).
They were once consistently left of center, but nowadays they preach the same neoliberal “solutions” you’ll get from the likes of Merkel, only, funnilly enough, even under the CDU in Germany they actually had more and better regulations in such key markets as housing than the supposedly “left” PS has.
(I lived in both The Netherlands and Germany and the idea that the PS is “leftwing” in its policies is, when compared to what’s done in Northern Europe by even their righwing, pretty funny).
Sure, they’re leftwing by comparison with the US with their ultra-nationalism, religious nutcases and 2 centuries of power duopoly, but not by comparison with Northern Europe, which are the ones we should be emulating, not the socially backwards US and UK (I also lived in the latter).
But yeah, I agree that the choice of political parties in Portugal is horrible: not only does the mathematically rigged anti-democratic voting system (unlike, say, the Proportional Vote system that the Dutch have) creates a near power duopoly were people only really have to electable choices (the “lesser evil” and the “greater evil”, who switch periodically) but the party leadership suffers from the general problem in portuguese leadership (nepotism, cronyism, zero strategic thinking) only worse because they’re politicians.
(And don’t get me started on the PCP: I don’t think that putting Party first, always and above all else, is at all compatible with the leftwing principle of “The greatest good for the greatest number”, especially when - as we so clearly see on their take on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine - The Party is de facto nothing more than the arm of a specific foreign government and bunch of half a century old slogans).
Frankly, having returned to Portugal after 2 decades abroad, I have come to believe that in between the incoming desertification from Global Warming and the brain drain caused by house price inflation, low salaries and the shitiest managment culture and business class in Europe, the country is well on its way to be totally fucked withing a decade or two. Certainly making Tourism a keystone of the Portuguese Economy will never get the country to catch up with the sort of country in Europe where they bet on industries with high value adding (like Tech) - and to where many of those degree holding portuguese that emigrate end up working - simply because Tourism is mid-level in the value adding chain (more than agriculture and maybe low-tech low-scale industrial production) and has no real path to reach the levels of wealth creation per-worker as even modern industrial production can (the only high-value added kind of Tourism is that which caters for the rich, and that’s only a large enough market for nations the size of San Marino, not for a country of 10 million), so that condemns Portugal to be a just-about-developed country forever.
There’s the Portuguese government, mostly left wing for a long time and they’ve plunged us into an economical crisis and are ready to do it again. But they still are in power because the old folk doesn’t want to vote for anything they haven’t for the past century.
LOL! “Leftwing” - OMG!
We’re talking about the guys who are usually talking about “doing what’s good for businesses”, have spent 3 billion euros saving a failing private company (TAP, the airline) and now want to fully privatise it (which will yield less than half of that amount), over they years rigged the housing market in multiple ways to pump up a massive house price bubble (which now causes half the portuguese who get degrees to emigrate) and have cut funding for the National Health Service so hard that medical doctor have been leaving it in such large numbers that pregnancy services and ever emergency services are now regularly (and irregularly) closing in hospitals all over the country.
And don’t get me started on how big they are on subsiding well-connected companies and closing their eyes to their fiscal evasion (not just avoidance, actual evasion) like when the privatise electricity company sold a bunch of hydrogeneration dams without paying any of the due tax on the sale.
These guys are exactly the “centrists” being pointed out here, or in other words they’re neoliberals (hence the obcession with unconditional “supporting businesses” and privatisation) and they’re not even left of center by traditional political thinking (only in this day and age of an Overtoon Window so shifted to the right by late stage capitalism that “business supporting” and “privatising” are considered leftwing activities by the ignorant).
Unsurprisingly they and another party pretty much have a power duopoly and have held power together for almost 5 decades, making Portugal the shithole it is.
Technically speaking, PS is left wing, even though they are centrists on their policies.
But between them and the PSD, or even worse, the PCP, who are undoubtedly left wing, pick your poison.
Nah, the say of themselves as “leftwing” all the the while pursuing mainly a rightwing ideology in pretty much everything, most notably things like supporting any and all businesses (without a “only the ones positive for society” restriction), privatisation, lowering of regulation (most noteably by simply not applying the laws in the books) and so on.
I mean the only meaningful left-of-center policy they had in the last decade was raising the minimum wage, and that was more than offset by their treatment of the housing market as an “investment asset class” and pumping with several price-influencing measures (from given Golden Visas for 500k “investments in houses” and refusal to build public housing - in the country of Europe with the least public housing - to a very liberal attitude on turning housing into AirBnBs - which recently was found unconstitutional by the supreme court) a massive house price bubble that ate that minimum salary raise and then some (houses have been up about 12% a year, faster than even that minimum salary raise and way faster than average salary growth).
They were once consistently left of center, but nowadays they preach the same neoliberal “solutions” you’ll get from the likes of Merkel, only, funnilly enough, even under the CDU in Germany they actually had more and better regulations in such key markets as housing than the supposedly “left” PS has.
(I lived in both The Netherlands and Germany and the idea that the PS is “leftwing” in its policies is, when compared to what’s done in Northern Europe by even their righwing, pretty funny).
Sure, they’re leftwing by comparison with the US with their ultra-nationalism, religious nutcases and 2 centuries of power duopoly, but not by comparison with Northern Europe, which are the ones we should be emulating, not the socially backwards US and UK (I also lived in the latter).
But yeah, I agree that the choice of political parties in Portugal is horrible: not only does the mathematically rigged anti-democratic voting system (unlike, say, the Proportional Vote system that the Dutch have) creates a near power duopoly were people only really have to electable choices (the “lesser evil” and the “greater evil”, who switch periodically) but the party leadership suffers from the general problem in portuguese leadership (nepotism, cronyism, zero strategic thinking) only worse because they’re politicians.
(And don’t get me started on the PCP: I don’t think that putting Party first, always and above all else, is at all compatible with the leftwing principle of “The greatest good for the greatest number”, especially when - as we so clearly see on their take on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine - The Party is de facto nothing more than the arm of a specific foreign government and bunch of half a century old slogans).
Frankly, having returned to Portugal after 2 decades abroad, I have come to believe that in between the incoming desertification from Global Warming and the brain drain caused by house price inflation, low salaries and the shitiest managment culture and business class in Europe, the country is well on its way to be totally fucked withing a decade or two. Certainly making Tourism a keystone of the Portuguese Economy will never get the country to catch up with the sort of country in Europe where they bet on industries with high value adding (like Tech) - and to where many of those degree holding portuguese that emigrate end up working - simply because Tourism is mid-level in the value adding chain (more than agriculture and maybe low-tech low-scale industrial production) and has no real path to reach the levels of wealth creation per-worker as even modern industrial production can (the only high-value added kind of Tourism is that which caters for the rich, and that’s only a large enough market for nations the size of San Marino, not for a country of 10 million), so that condemns Portugal to be a just-about-developed country forever.