by
Binoy Kampmark
“Meanwhile
in Portugal we are witnessing the makings of a genuine coup with the
unwillingness of the establishment there to accept the outcome of an
election and the support won by parties who oppose EU austerity.”
Gerry
Adams, Sinn Féin, Oct 24, 2015
This is the
truest form of Euro authoritarianism, short of full prisons and
torture chambers. (These may, in time, come.) If you are not seized
by the idea, the fetishism of a currency; if you gather up your
forces to mount an offence against austerity, twinned as it with
monetary union, then you must be, in the eyes of these policing
forces, against the European project.
This obscene
inversion has found form in Portugal, yet another country that has
taken the road towards anti-democratic practice when it comes to the
battle between the outcome of staged elections and the heralded
inviolability of a broken euro system. It has the chill of history –
political groupings with a certain number of votes barred because of
supposedly radical tendencies. It has also received scant coverage in
certain presses, with a few notable examples, such as Ambrose
Evans-Pritchard’s observation that the country had “entered
dangerous political waters.”
First, the
mathematics of the election held on October 4. The combined Left bloc
won 50.7 percent of the vote (122 seats), while the conservative
premier, Pedro Passos Coehlo’s Right-wing coalition gained 38.5
percent – a loss of 28 seats. One would have to be a rather brave
and foolish individual to let the latter form government.
This, in
fact, is what Aníbal Cacavo Silva, the country’s constitutional
president, did. “In the 40 years of democracy, no government in
Portugal has ever depended on the support of anti-European forces,
that is to say forces that campaigned to abrogate the Lisbon Treaty,
the Fiscal Compact, the Growth and Stability Pact, as well as to
dismantle monetary union and take Portugal out of the euro, in
wanting the dissolution of NATO.”
The
statement hits upon a definition of the European project, if you can
call it that, linked to bound, self-interested market structures and
the virtues of military defence. Cavaco Silva evidently cannot
conceive that a European project could involve a variation of the
theme, let alone one averse to dogmas of austerity and the bank.
The
Socialists, under António Costa, have promised Keynesian reflation
policies with expenditures on education and health, a policy platform
very much at odds with the EU’s Fiscal Compact.
So much, in
that sense, for the legacy of the Carnation Revolution, which saw
Portugal’s post-Salazar normalisation. It was that generally
peaceful revolution that oversaw the demise of the Estada Novo,
António de Oliveira Salazar’s corporatist vision that shares, in
some perverse sense, similarities with the anti-democratic spirit of
EU market governance. Bolting from those same stables, Cavaco Silva
insists that the European left, and specifically the parties in
Portugal, are somehow against Europe, parochial and therefore
dangerous. The reverse, in fact, is the case.
The clue in
Cavaco Silva’s erroneous thoughts on where a pan-European idea lies
in his total faith in the market, corporate ideal. It is not the
language of voters and public investment here that counts, but the
ghostly forces of capital and private investment. The investors, the
financiers, and the bankers must be kept in clover – or the entire
country and by virtue of that, the EU, unravels.
“This
is the worst moment for a radical change to the foundations of our
democracy. After we carried out an onerous programme of financial
assistance, entailing heavy sacrifices, it is my duty, within my
constitutional powers, to do everything possible to prevent false
signals being sent to financial institutions, investors and markets.”
In point of
fact, the most radical tendency in history is the illusion that
democracy and the market do, in fact, have a relationship that
corresponds, rather than jars. In truth, democracy can only ever
survive when markets are controlled. The European financiers have
given the impression, manifested through the ideology of the Troika,
that the estranged European Union is democratic only because it has
such institutions as a single currency, or a tough austerity line.
The Greek
crisis showed this entire process to be a grim sham, with Athens now
a client state mortgaged to the hilt and contained by debt bondage.
This happened after Syriza won power in January with a platform that
seemed, at first, to be wholly against austerity. Sovereignty is
short changed, while the finance sector counts its gains.
The entire
context of such revolt in finance is permissiveness towards
reactionary, nationalist elements. This is the paradox of having a
supposedly flexible market that encourages the ease of liquidity in
the absence of stable social structures. Historically, the forces of
capital and finance permit a degree of nationalism and extremism as
long as the money sector comes good. The liquidity tends to stay put.
The
Portuguese example has become the most overt statement of this so
far, though the Left grouping promise to block and scuttle the
proposed four-year policy programme of the minority administration
when the assembly resumes.
Till the two
points meet – the pro-European left inspired by
Keynesian-buttressed sovereignty, and the anti-democratic
institutions that have held the European idea hostage – the notion
of a workable euro zone will disintegrate. It will become, instead, a
geographical area populated by authoritarian governments who see
elections as mere pantomimes.
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