Running Out of Options, Portugal Turns Right
PAJAMAS MEDIA
In Portugal, this year’s elections mark the beleaguered country’s most significant turn to the right since the seventies. Of course, the right is not exactly the same as the right in the U.S., but it is the rightward-most option available. In some respects, the Partido Social Democrata can sound almost libertarian.
Their work is cut out for them. In Portugal, a different understanding of the state and its relationship with the people prevails than that enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. In Portugal, the idea that the government is at the mercy of the governed is, if not heresy, occasion for the open-mouthed incomprehension usually reserved for the remarks of an eccentric aunt or grandmother.
Yet, Portugal is in a predicament similar to America’s. Both countries have too many commitments and not enough money to cover them.
This is not new in Portugal — a country that started out profoundly indebted, having promised the pope some fantastical amount of gold in exchange for the recognition of its independence from one of the lands that eventually united to become Spain.
Portugal has played the game of going heavily into debt only to inflate it away by running the printing presses day and night. This was both permissible and negligible: permissible because its currency was its own to do with as it pleased, and negligible because it was a very small country to whom other, bigger countries, could repeatedly lend (relatively) great amounts of money — and because most people didn’t have their wealth in any form but in inherited land or gold.
Because the debts Portugal inflated away were small by international standards, they were roughly the equivalent of foreigners such as Americans “supporting” a child in a third world country at $20 a month. It is no great amount to us, and it makes a huge difference to the child.
But then Portugal became one of the European Union countries.
While giving all your power to unelected and unaccountable leaders is one of those ideas so profoundly stupid that only the very well educated and conventionally intelligent could believe in it, many accepted the root idea that all which stood between Portugal and competitiveness was its lack of size. If Portugal joined with the other countries of Europe, all of Europe would show America a thing or two.
Somehow this has failed to materialize, and no one mentions it anymore — speaking wistfully instead of the day when China will replace the U.S. (as if the Chinese would indulge Europe as the Americans have done!). And Portugal is torn between breaking away from the EU to fall into its old but comfortable habits and reckoning with the possibility that the rest of the world might opt against keeping the loans coming.
There have been several showdowns. A steadfast refusal to pass a bloated budget finally led to the fall of government. Teachers have had to take a cut in benefits despite their strenuous protests, and yet social security payments have gone up. Voters must choose either bread and circus or austerity.
Here is what they face: a “new left” under Prime Minister Jose Socrates, slick and polished and full of its own wisdom which consists, in the end, of practicing crony capitalism in a more suave way than its predecessors; a right-leaning coalition torn between privatization and mercantilism; and a hodgepodge of unreconstructed radicals vowing to “increase production and renegotiate the debt.” How is Portugal to increase production in a country where the top tax rate is more than 50%? Where unemployment is a way of life, particularly for the young? I suspect like all bureaucrats seeking to dictate economic change from above, they would prescribe a five-year plan, calling for a steel furnace in every backyard.
So the success of the rightward coalition in the new elections was bittersweet. Bittersweet because PSD did not win enough of a majority to rule alone and must instead ally with the Centro Democratic Social/Partido Popular, which is definitely the “rightward most” party in Portugal, at least on the axis of protectionism. It wishes for a kinder, gentler government, not necessarily a smaller one — a government that encourages “traditional ways of life” and takes a benevolent view of economic protectionism.
The word “compromise” was used so much in the victory speech by the party leader that I was sure the speaker must be a McCain on his mother’s side. On the other hand, there remained odd grace notes, particularly for Portugal. The victors want to shrink government and call a constitutional convention to remove the dread words “Portugal is a republic on the way to socialism” (among others).
Alas, still left unaddressed are the unavoidable facts, so unavoidable that Portuguese might be no more aware of them than a fish is of water: social commitments are unsustainable; cradle to grave social security cannot and will not work in a country where borders are effectively open and the native population is aging and failing to adequately reproduce; it is impossible to become rich with one month guaranteed paid vacation for all and untold paid “leaves” for various reasons; it is impossible to be the most productive country of Europe when one has the most holidays of any European country.
Unspoken also is the staggering cost of bureaucracy in Portugal. Part of this is because Portugal is a country where when looking for work one must keep in mind that “he without a godfather dies in jail” — that is, he without connections will get nowhere. The idea of restraining government growth has never really occurred to anyone. In fact, government is where you find a job for that unemployable youth or your ne’er-do-well cousin, by talking to “some guy I know.”
I seem to remember hearing in school that the Portuguese chose to adopt French-style bureaucracy. The idea seems staggeringly unlikely, but people do all sorts of stupid things, particularly when those people are very educated and theoretically smart. For the simplest things — say, re-booking a flight — one must get form B with which to obtain form C with which, if that clerk is not out at lunch or on coffee break, you might hope to obtain the other form that gets you the ticket. This is so not just in government but everywhere. It’s entirely possible this madness has seeped into the national character, formed by education and culture. (My family is shocked I have to punctuate my novels myself, surely a restraint on my artistic talent. Surely they have some secretary who can do that for me?)
At any rate, every time I come to Portugal, I leave with the picture of an energetic and often brilliant or at least plucky people, constrained by an unresponsive government and a crushing bureaucracy — a people whose principal export, increasingly, is the more ambitious and work-minded of its children.
It could probably be said that this is our future.
I wish the victors of their — and our — latest elections luck and spine. They’re going to need both.
i will put it this way i support government programs that help our own people in America, not help illegal immigrants but our own American citizens, its time America cut off all foreign aid except to Israel then we can help our own, America needs to quit taking care of the world and take of its own, i dont believe the us government of America is broke i think we the American people are being lied to when we are told the us government is broke,
i will say this we as Americans voted them in we can also vote them out, so the tea party and republicans that control the house will eventually lose the us house of reps, no party keeps control forever, so there is no forcing us in America to vote a certain way, and i have said it before any country that abandons its poor, elderly, homeless, hungry will face Gods judgement period, read Deuteronomy 15:7-11 Old Testament it talks about dealing with the poor
http://lemonlimemoon.blogspot.com/2008/06/right-and-left-both-enemies-of-jews.html
Awesome retort to Mr Rodriguez and his famous wake-up call. Priceless. btw, where’s the full essay – the link isn’t working.
Portugal’s plight along with the rest of europe from a Jewish POV is only Justice delayed by justice all the same.
Remids me of a blog essay I read recently by Lemon from ‘Lemon Lime’
She says everything I myself not only agree with but have said similar things without her incomparable style.
Right and Left.. Both Enemies of Jews
Spanish Journalist, Sebastian Villar Rodriguez wrote this:
I was walking along Raval (Barcelona) when all of a sudden I understood that Europe died with Auschwitz.
We assassinated 6 million Jews in order to end up bringing in 20 million Muslims!
We burnt in Auschwitz the culture, intelligence and power to create.We burnt the people of the world, the one who is proclaimed the chosen people of God.
Because it is the people who gave to humanity the symbolic figures who were capable of changing history (Christ, Marx, Einstein, Freud…) and who is the origin of progress and wellbeing.
We must admit that Europe, by relaxing its borders and giving in under the pretext of tolerance to the values of a fallacious cultural relativism, opened it’s doors to 20 million Muslims, often illiterates and fanatics that we could meet, at best, in places such as Raval, the poorest of the nations and of the ghettos, and who are preparing the worst, such as the 9/11 and the Madrid bombing and who are lodged in apartment blocs provided by the social welfare.
We also have exchanged culture with fanaticism, the capacity to create with the will to destroy, the wisdom with the superstition. We have exchanged the transcendental instinct of the Jews, who even under the worst possible conditions have always looked for a better peaceful world, for the suicide bomber. We have exchanged the pride of life for the fanatic obsession of death. Our death and that of our children.
What a grave mistake that we made!!!
Read Full Essay!
II prefer Brazilian portuguese to Spanish but what happened to these heroes in 1940. Portugal was one of the first countries to close the doors to Jews.
My friend Crystal K who lives in Portugal, writes,