Bulletins and News Discussion from March 10th to March 16th, 2025 - The New World Struggles To Be Born; Now Is The Time Of Proxy Wars - COTW: Myanmar

Image is from Wikipedia's article on the war..

I've wanted to cover Myanmar for a while now but haven't had the needed knowledge to write much more than "This situation really sucks." After doing a little reading on the situation, I feel even more confused. A decent analogy is the Syrian Civil War, at least while Assad was in power (though it's still pretty true today) - many different opposition groups, some co-operating with the United States, others not. The main government supported partially by an anti-American superpower, but who could live with that government collapsing if there are deals to be made with the group coming into power. A conflict kept going and exploited at least partially by the United States and other imperial core powers, though with plenty of genuine domestic animosity and desires for political independence.

Recently, the Myanmar government - the mainstream media uses "junta", which is probably accurate despite the connotations - has promised elections at the end of 2025. This doesn't seem likely to happen, and even if it did, how this would work in a country as war-torn as Myanmar is unclear. The government is losing territory and soldiers at a quick pace; they now hold only 21% of the country, though that 21% does at least comprise many of the cities. It's difficult to get a handle on the number of people affected because civil wars and insurgencies have been ongoing in some shape or form for decades, but we're talking at least millions displaced and thousands of civilians killed.

Here's a comment by @TheGenderWitch@hexbear.net from fairly recently that covers the situation in Myanmar:

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The portuguese government drama that I talked about here has come to a close. The government's motion of confidence failed and the president is set to dissolve parliament, in the last hours before the vote the government basically asked the socialist party to withdraw or shorten the lenght of its proposed parliamentary inquiry into the prime minister Luis Montenegro's business dealings but the party refused, it was a huge shitshow.
Since the last time it has come out that the PM, despite having an institutional residence at the São Bento Mansion has been staying at a 5 star hotel every night because he made a deal with the hotel grouping to pay only 250 a night, he also admitted that all the clients that his family's consultancy company currently has, including a casino company, had all been acquired while he was the main partner at it. He's refused to resign and has said he'll still be the PM candidate when elections happen.
Last week polls still had the center-right PSD leading but this week have the PS in front again but polls have gotten shit wrong here several times lately.
This means we're gonna have legislative elections for the 4th time in 5 years, which is quite unusual here, and also it's not clear if we won't have a hung parliament after may's elections. The last government to last 4 years was the PS-led "contraption" (named so because it was thought it wouldn't last) government 2015-2019 that had a confidence and supply agreement with the far left, ironic, because the government elected in 2019 which saw the PS's vote share increase enough that it only had to depend on 1 far-left party fell in late 2021 when both the communists and left block refused to support the government's "most leftist government budget ever" (this was a real talking point that socialist apparatchiks had).
In january 2022 Antonio Costa, general secretary of the portuguese socialist party, obtained the second absolute majority government in the party's history and the socialists governed alone, honestly this was before the ukraine shit where the communists went back to being anathema due their anti-nato stance on the war, so even if the government hadn't fallen in 2021 the socialists would probably not want to depend to communist support for anything. The decision of the far-left to withdraw support in 2021 however was wise since the socialist majority government, which only lasted until 2024, was ass, there were some milquetoast gains (now on the PS's terms instead of the negotiated terms they used to have to comply with the far-left) but housing and healthcare got worse, the socialists were basically emptying out the center-right by applying its economic policies, and the government was rife with, in retrospective minor, scandals that built up into eventually the public prosecutor declaring that they were investigating the PM for alleged crimes, which ended up not going anywhere, but he chose to resign anyway to protect the credibility of the institutions, when his name was cleared he went to brussels, the president didn't have to dissolve parliament but he did, he probably saw it as an opportunity to put the right back in power after 10 years, which is what happened, but not without controversy because even though in the 2024 elections the PSD had 0.8% more votes than the socialists, the socialists had 1 MP more and it sort of became a question who the president would invite first to form a government, he chose his own party. The far-right in that election rose to 18%, but it's likely to lose some votes this year.
The PSD has been leading a minority government that always had to depend on either the socialists or the far-right for its budgets, and ultimately all its policy foibles also land on the PS since it abstained or supported plenty of them, nevertheless the current general secretary of the PS is touted as being from the leftist wing of the party, even though he's to the right of bernie sanders, plus there's a pro-war europhile green party that appropriated a lot of progressive/liberal young voters and even shares electorate with the right-wing Liberal Initiative party, the Left Block is also going through a public scandal that has seen it fall in the polls while the communists still have the "Pro-russia" smear liberally applied anytime they get any media attention, and these days also a brand new "pro-trump" smear since they're pretty much the only ones protesting the EU's militarism and rearmament plans.
It's also not clear what kind of government could result from elections right now, the center-right refuses to govern formally with the far-right which they need for a majority, there's no tradition and no space and no dialogue for germany style PS-PSD coalitions in this country and the socialists are not likely to get another absolute majority. A repeat of the 2015-2021 style of governance is complicated since although it was probably better for the country it did not explicitly electorally benefit the far-left (you could argue that in some ways it did in the long-term by making the parties, though not their policies, more acceptable to vote for in people's eyes) and ultimately the condition for the left to support the PS was that lives of working people needed to keep getting better, and in 2015 the PS was open to that by being willing to undo some of the austerity the troika government had enforced (2011-2015) but the last time the PS led the government it was just doing managed decline but with budget surpluses so it would've been hard to keep supporting anyway. Unfortunately though a lot of leftist, even self-proclaimed socialists, voters still want the socialist party to govern and are extremely scared of the far-right so if both the left block and the communist party are seen as being irresponsible or too demanding partners they'll probably flock to the eurocuck greens whose whole identity is that they love the EU (its leader has also urged macron to put france's nuclear weapons at the disposal of the EU so it can decide when to use them), want to be junior partners to the PS (in some local elections they already are) and won't impose any tough conditions, however both parties have more than enough reasons to want to remain in opposition
- Does the PCP still have a boost from trying to call the initial vote of confidence?
  I want to try to convince my radlib leaning dad to vote for them, but he’d probably go PS unless it was clear the PCP would get enough seats to make a difference.
  
  Hard to say, since even when their own motion of no confidence was being voted on they barely got any media coverage, and when they did it was so commentators could say they were actually saving the government by trying to make the PS vote to bring it down or to destabilize the country so we couldn't support ukraine or some shit.
  Also, obviously because of how electoral districts work the most chance they have to elect MPs is in the Lisboa, Porto, Setubal, Evora and Beja districts (maaaaaaybe also Santarem). So voting for the party outside of those is basically a protest vote. Just try to convince your dad I guess, he'll probably hit you with the "slava ukraini I'm not voting for putinists", to which you can say "we'll the communists have been calling for negotiations from day 1 and look what's happening now".
  Also like I said, if someone wants a PS government voting for the communists is not a guarantee that will happen, so they'll likely just go for the PS or more conciliatory parties and then complain when they're policies aren't left enough

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