Geringonça and the role of the Portuguese elections in taming the democratic crisis Draft: Van Vossole, Jonas (2017), Electoral Reconfiguration in Portugal: Implications for Democracy, paper presented at PSA 67th Annual International Conference, Glas, 10 April 12 February. Introduction The effects of the euro-crisis have led to a breakdown of the democratic hegemony in Portugal. The hegemonic perspective about democracy, which combined liberal electoral democracy with development through European integration and the remnants of the social and political rights derived from the April-revolution, had been around for nearly 40 years but exploded in 2011. In this chapter we analyse how the discourses and perspectives of democracy evolved and rearticulated in the period after the crisis. We will focus the role of the elections and institutional coalition formation on the social movements and parties, and their discourses about democracy. The first section of the chapter describes how the crisis rendered its balanced configuration of forces around European/occidental integration and a developing social welfare state through the form of a representative parliamentary democracy unsustainable, leading to a generalized democratic legitimacy crisis, comparable to similar events in other countries since 2011. An outburst of huge protest movements and the emergence of a period of “demodiversity” with a wide range of alternative democratic perspectives – with the indignado-like “acampadas” as the most well-known example, challenged the previously hegemonic liberal representative model. As over the years 2012 to 2014 the anger with the system came to be evermore personified in the person of the prime minister, Passos Coelho, and the Troika institutions, and the 2015 general election date approached, social protest Comentado [F1]: Approaching? was increasingly canalized towards an electoral drive to oust the incumbent right-wing government. Comentado [F2]: Rever frase formalmente, para tornar a ideia mais clara. The second section of this chapter describes how the period of waiting for a reconfiguration – with different deliberative, utopistic and participative democratic horizons - led back into an electoral representative logic. What came into life as a propagandistic/tactical discourse was through the internal systemic logic institutionalized in a renewed - though feeble - electoralist reconfiguration, formalized through the legitimating discourses around the “leftwing” government agreement. The last section analyses the interconnected weaknesses of this new balance. First of all, it points to the unresolved political-economic fragilities which served as the material basis for the crisis: namely the political and economic configuration of the EU and the Eurozone and the peripheral position of Portugal. On the other hand the continuing existence of different political agendas and players underneath the new balance. Most of the young active participants in protests have not relinquished their deep beliefs about a failing political system, but fail – at least temporarily - to find openings for radical ideas in the reconfigured democratic discourse, some adapting to political-electoral logics, others retracting to extra- political activities. Context: Bilan of an “exemplary” government The 2015 parliamentary elections came as a reckoning with four years of austerity policies Comentado [b3]: A ritualized decision about the previous period of crisis. implemented by the right-wing PSD-CDS government led by Passos Coelho and Paulo Portas. During this period, Prime Minister Passos Coelho repeatedly stated that he wasn’t interested in elections; “Que se lixem as eleicoes” – “Fuck of Elections” - he literally said in an interview on 23 July 20121: “electoralism” would stand in the way of "good policy". Comentado [b4]: That policy was above all guided by the idea of balancing the Portuguese budget and improving the “competitiveness” of the Portuguese economy. Together with the “experts” of the delegations of the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank, which compose the so-called Troika, policies were developed that deeply affected crucial elements of the post 1974 welfare state: public services such as the postal services, public transport systems, and the national airways were to be privatized, massive cuts were made in the budgets for education and research, the budgets of health care and culture. At the same time, there were significant cuts in public service wages and pensions, while in the private sector, the previously agreed rise in minimum wages was cancelled. Labour rights were made more “flexible”, with a huge increase in the 1 http://www.jornaldenegocios.pt/economia/detalhe/passos_coelho_quotque_se_lixem_as_eleiccedilotildees_o_ que_interessa_eacute_portugalquot precariousness of jobs, etc. In the international financial press, the European Commission and the European council, Portugal was presented as a “model pupil”2 in the execution of European policies. The opposition in Portugal, however, accused the government to be more “Troikist than the Troika"3. The opposition accused the government of instrumentalizing the economic crisis to implement their own harsh neoliberal agenda - going far beyond the requirements of the EU and the IMF -, a disguised political agenda which they would never have been able to implement in “normal” conditions. (Freire 2017, 47) By most standards, the austerity agenda has proven to be an absolute failure. Its policies got delegitimized through the procedures applied, as well as through its results. (Freire, 2017 47) According to 68% of the population the economic state of exception did not justify the violation of electoral promises and 90.6% of the population said the sacrifices of austerity are not equitatively distributed: while the social contract – the electoral promises, labour contracts, pensioner’s rights… – were deeply affected, the “private” contracts with banks, private public partnerships and swaps are at best mildly renegotiated. (Freire 2017, p47-48) At the same time, the policies have disastrous social and political consequences; such as the sell-out of strategic public assets, with corresponding transfer profits, to foreign – particularly Chinese and Angolan -financial investors, the accelerated emigration of around half a million young people - the most educated generation ever in the country, in which it had invested billions of euros-, and connected with it the rapidly increasing depopulation and desertification of the interior of the country. It also failed to comply with its own standards: on the economic front, the government's policies did not result in a more “healthy” budget, more economic activity or a lower public debt. On the contrary; the Portuguese public debt rose from 111.4% in 2011 to 130.3% of GDP in 2015. Government expenses rose 44,9% of GDP in 2011 to 49,9% in 20144. And the government deficit has never been able to get inside the margins of the stability pact. In its defence, the government tried to rely on the unemployment statistics; the unemployment was definitely lower than the 12,7% at the start of the legislature in 2011; after a continuous rise to a maximum of 16,2 in 2013, unemployment dove to rate of 12,4% 2 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11912333/Portuguese-political-stalemate- threatens-to-derail-eurozones-model-pupil.html 3 http://www.dn.pt/politica/interior/governo-mais-troikista-que-a-troika-acusa-ps-3393069.html - http://www.tvi24.iol.pt/politica/pcp/psd-e-mais-troikista-que-a-troika 4 http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GC.XPN.TOTL.GD.ZS?locations=PT in 20155. In the absence of structural economic growth this reduction is largely due to two factors: The government launched a new program to subsidize flexible and temporally employment through internships in public and private sectors – people in those internships disappeared from the long-term unemployed statistics. The other factor was the mass emigration of nearly half a million young people. Despite the decline in unemployment rates, employment decreased from 4.74 milion in 2011 to 4.54 million in 2015, a loss of about 200.000 jobs.6 Meanwhile, the government followed a strategy short-term measures to increase its favourability. For example, they paid out exceptional personal tax-refunds the week before the elections and claimed to refund part of the “extra-ordinary” cuts in holiday pay and in pensions that were made since 2013 – despite that this refund was solely the result of a legal decision of the Constitutional Court against the executive following complaint from the left block and the communist party. Crisis of the democratic model and demo-diversity This acute period of economic hardship and social crisis in Portugal brought an end to the consensus on democracy. Freire (2017, 132-133) quotes Peter Mair (2013) on the main reasons for this democratic crisis: First the devaluation of politics; a trend that gives ever more power to non-elected institutions and “experts”, as well as the rise of “non-political”- politicians. Second: the declining political polarization between mainstream political forces, lack of clarity of alternatives through a moderation of the radicals and the use of grand coalitions. Third; neoliberal globalization and the pressure of the markets onto political choices. As I also worked out in previous work (VAN VOSSOLE, 2014, VAN VOSSOLE and CASTRO, 2016) this divergence of ideas about democracy is thus not new. Neither