The government agreement that CDS, PPM, PSD, Chega and IL made in the Azores has been the subject of heated debate. In this agreement, it was established that PSD, CDS and PPM govern in coalition, with the parliamentary approval of Chega and IL.
The news is that Chega was included in that agreement, knowing that this recent party is, what we now call, the populist extreme right, a novelty in our political system.
The populist extreme right has grown in recent years all over the world, with greater success in the U.S. with Trump, in Brazil with Bolsonaro, in Hungary with Orbán or in the Philippines with Duterte. But also in France with Le Pen, in Spain with Vox or in Italy with Salvini, this international movement is gaining power and creating media and political impact.
In Portugal, Chega joined the Assembly of the Republic in 2019 and now joins the Regional Assembly of the Azores in 2020. The surveys indicate some margin of growth for this movement in the next legislatures.
These movements of the populist far-right are characterized by choosing some specific problems in the society in which they operate, promising easy, miraculous solutions to very complex issues.
The simplistic speech, the oratory skills of the leaders of these parties, the invocation of the most fundamentalist religiosity and well-structured guerrilla campaigns on social networks end up mobilizing a certain constituency. Sometimes enough to come to power.
The truth is that none of this is new. At the beginning of the century. XX, these same devices were used to implant fascism and Nazism in Europe, which came to have the tragic consequences that the two great world wars and the holocaust prove.
Furthermore, the speech that the populist extreme right parties use today, demonizing Islamists, gypsies, homosexuals, communists, immigrants, progressives, atheists, Africans or even the world economic order, is a clear decal what the fascists and the Nazis did. Only the trampling of the Jews is missing.
And this is where an insurmountable frontier is drawn at the level of ideological comparisons between the extreme right and communism. The extreme right is, ideologically, segregationist, supremacist, racist, non-humanist and anti-democratic. Communism is moving towards a society where everyone contributes according to their possibilities and enjoys it according to their needs. It is a pure humanism (in most Christian, even).
Now, it turns out that all the experiences of the so-called “real socialism” fell into authoritarian, undemocratic, militarized and police systems, with little economic capacity and very corrupt.
Feudal, agrarian and tsarist Russia became the USSR at the expense of invasions and a dictatorial regime, without ever being a communist. The same is true of China, Cuba or North Korea (which is nothing more than the only absolutist monarchy in the 21st century).
It is enough to have a minimum reading of Marx to realize that communism can only happen after a deep maturation of capitalism worldwide, something that has not happened yet (as i already wrote here). That is, there was Stalinism, Maoism, Pol Potism, Castrism or Ceausesquism. But not yet, communism.
Thus, while Nazism and Fascism were put into practice, faithful to the ideology, with the terrible results that were seen, Communism was never achieved, and the attempts were all poorly implemented.
Moreover, today, in Portugal, neither PCP nor Block call themselves Stalinists or Maoists, nor defenders of concentration camps, death sentences, physical or chemical castrations, segregation of people according to their skin color or philosophical beliefs or the installation of political police.
PCP and Bloco are on the humanist side of politics. Enough, no. This is the big frontier. This is the great wall that we must not drop.
Not least because, as is well seen in Hungary (with successive last-minute changes to the electoral law and changes to the constitution) or in the U.S. (with Trump’s immoral behavior after the election defeat), these populist right-wing leaders, as soon as they come to power, the first thing they do is try to subvert the rules so that they don’t leave there (Putin, by the way, looks good in this lot, and of course Putin is nothing communist), because they know that if they got there democratically, democratically there they cannot stand.
Anyway, while PCP and Bloco, no matter how much they may disagree with their economic or social options, today they are humanist parties and the liberal democratic system, Chega, no. He is not humanist, he wants a new Republic and the first thing he would do, if he came to power, was to end our Constitution and liberal democracy to perpetuate itself dictatorially. With such an agenda, you cannot negotiate.
The author writes according to the old spelling.
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