On the surface things don’t seem to have significantly changed in Portugal’s political landscape in the wake of yesterday’s European elections. The Socialist Party beat the ruling centre-right coalition with a lower-than-expected margin. Marinho e Pinto’s surrogate party MPT benefited from the electoral one-man-show of the season: the controversial independent surged this small party’s vote turnover to the point of getting elected in what turned out to be a rather expected surprise. The Communist Party, usual receivers of the disaffected vote in a country with no far-right alternatives such as France’s Front Nationale our UK’s UKip, scored quite well too. But the analysis of the results has largely missed the point, I think. As the marginally victorious mainstream left tries to pose as a credible government alternative and the ruling centre-right party sighs with relief, a deeper, more worrying truth is lurking under the sound bites: the political centre is growing weaker.
I mean, let’s look at the figures: in absolute terms the winning party managed to get just over one million votes; the ruling coalition, two parties which on the last legislative elections accounted for almost 3 million votes together, plummeted to around 900.000 yesterday. High levels of abstention notwithstanding, this is a fact both parties are well aware of: they’re weaker and weaker, weak to the point of both considering an until recently inconceivable possibility, i.e. forming a central coalition (which, I think, as a remedy would be worse than the disease). In the midst of this it’s the ruling coalition’s reaction that sounds the most ironic. By minimizing the socialist victory, they’re just making their own collapse more visible: they were defeated by the lowest-scoring Socialist Party victory ever. Such an outcome should be cause for alarm: instead, both parties will cause each other further attrition, until they eventually fall prey to some emerging charismatic character. MPT’s Marinho e Pinto has set the tone for the near future: a loud political commentator with inquisitorial tendencies (an “everyone is corrupt except me” kind of routine) has outmanoeuvred candidates like Rui Tavares, who yesterday failed re-election at the head of a newly-formed party (we have sixteen already). With a much more recommendable track record, his more low-key attitude and articulate political statements seemed to have rendered him essentially unintelligible for the larger public: too long, too smart, too traditional, too serious even. By contrast, and despite his general Torquemada-style vociferations, Marinho e Pinto has never said, in clear terms, where he stands. I was unable to discern his political whereabouts, and that was precisely what his go-for-all attitude aimed at preventing voters from doing. Thus vagueness becomes an advantage.
But even more worrying was that for all Marinho e Pinto’s understandable vagueness (he’s just a secondary character in this play, after all, bound to fade into the distance as soon as he takes office in Brussels), the two major parties managed to be even vaguer, arcane even. The political mainstream seems to be failing to articulate even the simplest of promises, let alone a coherent project for the country. Both on the right and the left, the habit of speaking through the medium of macroeconomic data has estranged them from their public. When politics seems to be no more than a matter of lines going up and down on a graph the need for voters to state their opinions appears to fade. More than disaffection, discontent or lack of interest, yesterday’s election results hint at something even worse: on the one hand, there’s the growing inability of those who rule to explain to those whom they rule what they’re doing; on the other hand, there’s the common man struggling to even begin to fathom what it is all about. Then, politicians try to make do with what’s left. Enacted the way it has been, politics is little more than a fast-degrading pantomime. Politically savvy people may concede that there’s inevitably a degree of farce in public life, even as they disapprove of the hollow nature of much of the drama; as for the majority of people, sunk as they are in inaction, the buffoon eventually has the upper hand when it comes to capturing their attention. By speaking the language of the public, candidates such as Marinho e Pinto manage to temporarily bridge the gap between the common man and the elites: we are all aware of the dangers involved in this process, but it’s not the purported demagogue that worries me here. Rather, it’s the emptiness, the growing mood of uselessness: the feeling that voting is turning into the habit of a minority of people who still strive to make sense of it all; the impression that political statements just dissolve into thin air as the arid vocabulary of management progressively engulfs every aspect of public life; the joke, progressively and disturbingly taken more seriously, that we could as well get a management consultancy to run the country.
The political centre is getting weaker in Europe (and Portugal is no exception) not because the extremes have become intrinsically attractive, but simply because politics isn’t making sense anymore in the mind of the common man. His vote, when he bothers using it, just adds to the joke politics already is. Doubts? Again to the raw figures: null and blank votes amount to nearly a quarter of a million; if counted, they would have elected two representatives.
