I have my ears full of socialists, “book writers” and blockers complaining that, in Lisbon, Alexandra Leitão did not win the city council from Carlos Moedas because of the CDU, the coalition where the PCP is.
History shows that the left can only fully unite in moments of political exception. It was like this in 1936, when the fascist threat forced French socialists and communists to form the Popular Front, overcoming years of mutual hostility.
A drive for national survival also united, after 1945, the French and Italian left in post-war reconstruction governments, which laid the foundations of Social Security and the nationalization of strategic sectors of the economy.
But the left front has always had a downside that cannot now be ignored: the formation of a broad counter-offensive (financial, diplomatic, cultural and media) aimed at breaking the weakest link in these unions: the socialists. And, historically, these almost always end up giving way.
In Italy and France, in 1947, communist ministers were expelled from the government due to explicit American demands. The pattern was repeated when Mitterrand, from the PS, tried to implement the “common program” with the PCF in 1981: two years of capital flight and market blackmail were enough for the president to back down, embrace austerity and leave the communists adrift.
The financial crisis and austerity of the 2010s in a certain way recreated, in the Iberian Peninsula, the climate of urgency of the old Italian and French times, which led to the birth of the Portuguese “geringonça” and the PSOE–Unidas Podemos coalition.
But the classic counteroffensive was mounted. In Portugal we had Passos Coelho accusing the PS, for making an agreement with PCP and Bloco, of having crossed a “red line”, a concept that, contradictorily, he now says is not democratic when referring to PSD/Chega negotiations. We had the markets, the European Commission, the ECB and television broadcasting economic disasters with each announcement of a social support measure or income recovery. Chega and IL himself, given the weakness of the PSD and CDS at that time, were born openly to “fight socialism” and “run with the communists”.
The pressure worked. In 2022, the lead of a budget that gave in too much to economic power led to the end of the agreement on the left, gave the PS an absolute majority, created a disastrous government by António Costa (who even seems to have won the presidency of the European Council as a prize) and gave rise to the subsequent electoral rise of the entire right.
In Spain, the initial PSOE–Unidas Podemos (now Sumar) coalition survived, in trouble, but the classic threat is there: marriages between socialists and communists repeat, since the French Popular Front of 1936, a plot of initial enthusiasm, concrete social gains and desolate brutal ruptures.
The communists never came out stronger in these episodes and almost always lost voters to the socialists, who came out favored by imposing, precisely, the idea of a “useful vote on the left” that Alexandra Leitão also claimed for the Lisbon election.
Yes, the union of the entire left may be necessary again, but it must be an exception, it cannot be trivialized as it would be in this local election because, later on, if it were the only alternative to defeat the extreme right, it would be so worn out that it would simply not work.
Journalist
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