Making them the 3rd largest party in the country is not exactly a defeat to the far right. I don't know why this rhetoric keeps popping up, but just because they had a down tick compared to our last general election here, does not "solve" the problem of a rising far right normalisation.
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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Yeah, true. But relative to other EU countries it's good news that significantly less people voted for them.
I guess it also shows that people do make a bit more of a distinction between national and EU elections.
I wouldn't say that we make a better distinction between the two types of elections. I think what happened now was a "knee jerk reaction" to our last legislative elections in which we saw such a high increase of the far right. That coupled with the fact that the main person leading the left vote was the former health minister that was largely responsible for guiding us through the pandemic, was a good push in that left vote mobilisation in my opinion.
That can be explained for reasons other than their support having fallen.
Portugal doesn't have any significant anti-EU feeling, probably because Portuguese Nationalism doesn't have the kind of delusions of grandeur (i.e. the "we're better than other Europeans" beliefs) that you will find in the Nationalism of the larger European countries (and which was very much what propelled Brexit in the UK) and hence the local Fascist far-right (Chega) don't really sell that specific type of fable whilst the ultra neoliberal far-right (Iniciativa Liberal) think leaving the EU would be "bad for business and hence bad for the business elites" (which is entirelly what they're about).
Since a lot of the electorate of the Fascists are old, backwards and quite ignorant people who really don't follow or care about anything outside Portugal, it makes sense that in the absence of an anti-EU message from their party they would simply not care enough to go vote in EU elections.
Meanwhile Iniciativa Liberal, the other far-right party, are far more Technocratic and internationalists (their politics are literally importing a version of the American model on steroids - one even more Reaganist than Reagan - to replace the European-style social safety net) so their voters are just as much or more likely to vote in the EU elections as everybody else and hence they've actually increased their vote a lot percentage-wise (more than double) and even in absolute terms (12% more votes than in the last Parliamentary elections, which had a lot less abstention than the EU elections).
I wouldn't call this good news, though I definitelly agree with you that people are making "a bit more of a distinction between national and EU elections".
Good to hear that. Now, why are the Portuguese able to defeat far-right parties and the other European countries are not? What’s different in Portugal?
No we were not able to. We are sending extreme right wings for the first time to europe. 2 of them. They are the 3rd force now.
Thank you for the info, I really should subscribe to Euractiv so I can read the whole article…
In my experience it's pretty hard to get the politics of a different country without a significative time investment, and I say this as somebody who has moved into a couple of countries and eventually started getting the politics there even though I was actually living in those countries (after 10 years there, I was even a Green Party member in the UK).
Basically the 3rd and 4th placed parties are both far-right.
The 3rd most voted one (Iniciativa Liberal) is an ultra neoliberal party that basically wants to replace the European-style social safety net with an American model on steroids, which in American terms is probably at the right most end of the Democrat Party politics or a bit to the right of it. Their entire politics has no local origin whatsoever and their ideas are entirelly imported, so it does match very closely the kind of politics of American Finance types and Tech Bros (though Iniciativa Liberal did shut out about privatising the National Health Service when they saw just how badly received that was in Portugal).
The 4th most voted one (Chega) are Fascists of a mild strain. Portugal had Fascism until the Revolution of 74 and it was never very violent (not really prone to murdering and during WWII Portugal was even a safe transit point for Jews fleeing the Nazis, though the government of the time would not let Jewish refugees stay in the country) which is probably more a product of the Portuguese culture - one of the safest countries in the World when it comes to violence - than of the local Fascist being in any way "nice": people just aren't comfortable with high levels of violence so those parties know that won't sell well except amongst tiny tiny fridges (neo-nazi movements never amounted to much or lasted long around here). Nationalism in Portugal is pretty mild - as a small country which was dirt poor until recently, the Portuguese simply don't think of themselves as superior to most other Europeans (or, as far as I can tell, any other Europeans) - and Religion has considerably decayed toward general agnosticism since the Revolution in 74, so the modern Fascists here doesn't go for religiosity. Their politics pretty much all add up to anti-immigration and anti-establishment, with a bit of nationalism but one a lot less rabbid than what I've seen for example in the UK and which has no actual anti-Europeanism, so all very mild by comparison with for example Trump and even the AfD's and Le Penn's variants of Fascism.
Thank goodness.
@poVoq our socialists and liberals also defeated* the far-right in EU Elections, but they are just a bunch of corrupt entitled fuckers, holding some conservative views themselves as well. Hope this is not also the case with Portugal.
* the far right literally has more than one party in the parliament, with more MEPs than in the previous legislature!!!