Left Bloc: Government “tied PS” to a document that the extreme right could make viable

BE deputy Marisa Matias considered this Sunday that the Government “successfully” tied the PS to the State Budget proposal for 2025, which could be made possible by the extreme right, with warnings for a “sliding ramp”.

“With this Budget, the Government successfully sought to tie up the PS. And this is a budget that the extreme right could vote for, but it is the PS who will make it viable [através da abstenção]”, criticized Marisa Matias, who was speaking at the 5th BE National Conference, which ends today in Porto.

The bloc leader accused the PSD/CDS-PP minority executive of absorbing and normalizing the far-right agenda and discourse and deepening “the conservative agenda”.

“The sliding ramp is just starting. The no is no, which would be the Government’s supposed health barrier to the extreme right, is not, and has never been, due to a political or ideological demarcation, but for mere tactics. A power dispute is not necessarily a political dispute and this Government demonstrates this”, he argued.

In Marisa Matias’s view, the PSD/CDS-PP Government wants to occupy the space of the extreme right due to the way it addresses topics such as migration, human rights, racism, sexual education, reproductive health, the right to assisted death.

“There is no field that the Government is not trying to enter to make them a field of retreat”, he warned.

In this context, Marisa Matias claimed for BE the role of the political force “that stands up to the extreme right and its ideas, that fights the government of the right and counter-reforms and that is, as it always has been, the alternative to rotation towards the center” .

Moments later, former deputy José Manuel Pureza made an intervention with strong criticism of Chega and the extreme right, using a phrase from a Francoist general in 1936, “Long live death, down with intelligence”, and left warnings to the Government led by Luís Montenegro.

“Every time the Government and the traditional right take on the banners of the extreme right, the extreme right does not have less space. On the contrary, it gains space and gains social power. To this right-wing political bloc, whose policy is the ‘cocktail’ of two doses of liberalization, with two doses of securitization, the left responds with a policy of peace made up of justice”, he highlighted.

Disagreements about Lisbon

On Saturday, the BE political commission presented a document to the conference in which it defended, whenever possible, alternative alliances to the PS and PSD’s local governments in the country. But the topic generated some disagreements among blocists about a possible municipal coalition with the PS in Lisbon, with warnings of possible political dilution, but also calls for a “broad candidacy”.

In the text, the broad leadership of the Bloc makes a point, however, of highlighting its openness to a convergence to the left that challenges the social democrat Carlos Moedas in Lisbon – an appeal left today by former coordinator Francisco Louçã, who stressed the importance of the fight against real estate speculation in a possible pre-election understanding with the socialists.

However, not all blocists were in favor of this idea, with leader Manuel Afonso, who is part of the National Board, leaving the question: “What does Lisbon have that the rest of the country doesn’t have?” The leader highlighted that, in the “speculator troop that took the city by storm, Moedas is the leader”, but he has “a faithful squire, who is the PS”.

“Certainly, an eventual victory defeating Carlos Moedas would be a democratic breath of fresh air. But the next four years tied to his speculation lieutenant would be a hardship”, he warned.

In the same vein, Samuel Cardoso considered “a mistake to dilute the Bloc’s candidacy in Lisbon” in a coalition led by the PS, arguing that the socialists “will never accept a policy of rupture with real estate interests”.

“This option is bad because it glues the BE to the PS in the entire metropolitan area of ​​Lisbon and in the country due to the media centralism that Lisbon has, in a context in which the PS is glued to a right-wing government that we have to fight”, he maintained.

Former deputy Heitor de Sousa defended that BE should present its own candidacies and seek alliances where this is not possible, remembering that the PS is the party that leads the most municipalities in the country.

Director Bruno Góis came out in defense of a possible coalition, stating that “if Lisbon should be an exception it is not because BE invented this exception”, but because “the country is macrocephalic”.

Recognizing that housing must be a programmatic priority, the leader of the National Board argued that BE must, in Lisbon, “strive to give everything to the construction of the broadest possible candidacy to defeat Carlos Moedas”.

Bruno Góis recalled that the party already had municipal agreements in Lisbon and “showed that it is not tied to anything”.

During the afternoon, some blocists also disagreed on whether the party should prioritize the class and workers’ struggle compared to social causes such as feminism, anti-racism or LGBTQIA+ struggles, or whether all these struggles converge in an intersectional logic.

The historic founder Fernando Rosas rejected the idea that “the Bloc’s identity dissolves” in some of these social movements and highlighted that “the centrality of work cannot be incompatible against everything that capitalism represents beyond the extraction of surplus value: racism, homophobia.”

“We need alliances with principles, open and not closed. We must not accept a return to the caves regarding the nature of the party we want”, he warned, remembering the bloc motto that “it is essential to fight the entire fight”.

The same thesis was defended by founder Luís Fazenda, Francisco Louçã or former deputy Pedro Filipe Soares, who even accused these critics of being on the side of a “conservative, dissolving and dying” left.