Bulletins and News Discussion from March 3rd to March 9th, 2025 - Austerity And Its Consequences - COTW: Greece

Looks like Portugal's center-right minority government is coming down. Here's the drama, it was revealed that the prime-minister Luis Montenegro has a company, which he founded with his children and where his children still work, that gets 4k a month from a casino company called Solverde for consultancy services, and this came after it also being revealed that he and his wife ALSO have a real estate company, this in a country where house/rent prices are notoriously high. He has claimed to have divested from these enterprises.

Where does the communist party come into this? Well they put forward a no confidence vote to bring down the government. Immediately the media class and socialist party aparatchiks went into overdrive because the socialists didn't actually want to bring down the government themselves and be seen as a promoter of political instability, so they announced that they would abstain from the motion, guaranteeing that it wouldn't pass. Then they promoted the idea that the communists, and not the socialists, had "saved" the government because in literally voting to bring it down, with the socialists voting against it, they had actually helped the government because it now wouldn't feel the need to put forward a confidence motion in itself.

Well, guess what? It did anyway, and the socialists have said they will vote against the government's motion of confidence in itself, after abstaining from a motion of no confidence against the government, a clear example of what people here call "tacitismo" (tacticism) or "aproveitamento politico" (political exploitation). So we'll likely have elections in may, where do things stand?

Well shit's fucked, the government can't actually pass any laws without either the far right votes or the socialist party votes, still since we only had elections last year it's not unthinkable that it will benefit from having elections again so soon, the socialists have basically gone back to their strategy of in practice governing with the center-right in a bunch of key areas but rhetorically moving left which usually benefits them, the far right has been mired in criminal scandals (which I've posted about here) but that probably doesn't matter to people who vote for them (at this point is 10-18%), the right wing liberals mainly screech against socialism, communism and russia these days while a vocal faction inside it big-ups javier millei, the demsoc left block has been mired in a scandal over the allegedly unfair (but not illegal) firing of party workers (one of which had been a recent mother), these things usually affect them pretty hard since they are seen as a party of moralists (there was a case years ago where a party official owned an apartment building or something like that, and people still talk about that), the animalist party has 1 MP, the europhile pro-war greens are unfortunately rising in the polls since they have a charismatic leader who is given a ton of media attention (even I fell victim to him once) and have modernized the left by riding it of its "outdated" pretensions to socialism, anti-war activism and anti-capitalism.

And lastly there's the communist party, which runs in coalition with a pretty based anti-war green party, which for better or for worse will be seen has having been instrumental in bringing down the government, there was a recent poll that was VERY GOOD for the communists but it's likely an outlier, and the issue that mainly affects them negatively these days (aside from general end-of-historyism, having "communist" and a hammer and sickle literally in the name and being ignored by the media when it's not being smeared by them) is the ukraine war since it took an anti-nato anti-war position pretty early on and always called for negotiations and a political solution to the conflict, stating that a military solution was not desirable (or at least certainly wouldn't favor ukraine), I'm a bit optimistic that at THIS point in the war where negotiations are inevitable then the party's position won't be such a deal-breaker to voters, but on the other hand while the party was proven to have been right all along the media has not given it any real props, in fact now they say that the communists are not only "putinists" (which really fucking sucks to have so many people believe this shit) but also "trumpists".

So does this situation tie into the ukraine war? Not really, fortunately there's enough physical distance between portugal and that whole thing that it doesn't take up literally every inch of political discussion as it does in other countries (from what I see in these threads) but the media class LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE talking about that shit, and every news channel has at least a couple of hours everyday to talk about Z-man's latest courageous tweet. The portuguese and its elite are incredibly europhile, so whatever is agreed in brussels we're likely follow, unless there's a 230 MP communist majority government, there's a pervasive provincialism in the country where "only we are corrupt and incompetent, over there in the other countries they have perfect politicians".