Portuguese General Election

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The government has resigned after its budget was rejected. New election likely, so here's the thread.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Another unrelated remark about this is that while leftwing (government) parties have been taking a kicking in Europe troughout the crisis, we haven't actually seen any complete meltdowns, now have we? Labour got teh best result for a defeated government since, what, 1974?

No; the Callaghan government did a bit better (269/635, as opposed to 258/650). There's a tendency to forget that the 1979 election was no landslide; what kept Labour out of power for the next eighteen years wasn't the unpopularity of the Wilson/Callaghan government but the decision (taken independently by multiple factions) to construct the bestest circular firing squad eVar. But, yeah. Certainly not a meltdown and quite a bit better than most of us were dreading.

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Far too many for now.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Labour got a shocking result; it just wasn't reflected in their number of seats.

Well there's never a direct link between votes cast and seats won in Britain. But that's all that can be sanely compared with over more than a moderate length of time because one consequence of the electoral system is that the number of parties fighting large numbers of constituencies (and quite how large any large number in question actually is) changes irritatingly frequently. Not that anyone would exactly dispute that it was a bad result though.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I may be reading this entirely wrong, but I think that this is a logical result of the merger of the SDP, which always claimed to support European-style social democracy, with the Liberals, who were fundamentally an anti-socialist party.

Put it like this: when it came to Thatcher's employment/union legislation, the SDP were always conflicted and prone to splinter, but the Liberals were always enthusiastically in favour.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Of course one rather important thing was renationalised under the Blair administration; the railway network* (though not the train companies), the privatised 'Railtrack' company having distinguished itself with a record of sordid mismanagement and sheer incompetence that was impressive even by the rather low standards of British corporate management.

But... look... governments operate within certain frameworks, and those that try to break out of those frameworks are made to regret it pretty quickly. Imagine what would have happened had the newly elected Labour government in 1997 decided to nationalise almost everything (ignoring the fact that only one Labour government ever did nationalisation on a large scale and the fact that the Party leadership now believed in the idea that you could use the wealth generated by the new economy to pursue the Party's traditional goals in new ways. These are massive things to ignore, admittedly) that the Thatcher and Major governments had privatised.

Exactly.

Politics is about power, and not all of that power is controlled by elected governments. Any government in Portugal is going to do exactly what it is told to do by the rest of the world (acting in the interests of investors, for the most part) irrespective of the consequences; as we have seen already.

I've not read the discussion in much detail, so this post may seem like a bizarre tangent.

_{Officially of course the network was not nationalised, but given over to a not-for-profit company funded entirely by the taxpayer. Apparently there is an important difference.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Bad, very bad, but I think we should have expected something like this.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Are the Portuguese in the rest of Europe mostly migrant workers as in Britain, or?