Trapped in its current labyrinth, the Portuguese Left has an essential test of life in the next presidential elections, after successive recent electoral defeats. With the parliamentary hemicycle increasingly reinforced to the right and the municipal landscape now under predominant orange tones, the Presidential elections emerge as a crucial battlefield for the Left to maintain some visible power of influence among the main stages of the Portuguese political system. As we know, however, the process that culminated this Sunday with the choice of António José Seguro as the presidential candidate supported by the PS reveals anything but the proof of vitality that the Left urgently needed.
None of this has to do with Insurance, however. It is today what it was ten years ago. More than a political fact, the elevation of António José Seguro to the main presidential hope of the Portuguese left is yet another clinical symptom of that same Left. A former leader removed for not being able to bring together the party that is now returning to the political scene as the most viable name to try to stop the Right. Not exactly because it excites me, but because it was the name that remained. Let’s face it: there is no other way to interpret the Socialist Party’s embarrassing waiting period to make this support official.
The truth is that the Portuguese Left is currently going through a way of the cross which risks being long and painful. He arrives at this presidential antechamber out of breath, after successive defeats and an erosion that is not only electoral, but identity-based.
Of course, this is not a particular Portuguese phenomenon. Today there is a political exhaustion on the left that echoes globally, the result of an ideological fragmentation that the populist right has successfully managed. If the moderate Third Way Left, in the years 1990–2000, was seen by many as colluding with neoliberalism, extreme at the grassroots, we have recently seen how more progressive causes (feminism, LGBTQIA+ rights, environmentalism, anti-racism, immigration), which have become central to the Left’s agenda, have alienated some more conservative sectors or the traditional working classes, who see these themes as elitist or distant from their everyday problems.
The contemporary Left today lacks a new inspiring vision of the future, a unifying narrative, a collective “we” that can bring together precarious people, environmentalists, students, minorities, workers and businesspeople around a common agenda of progress.
The truth is that today, in Portugal and beyond, the Left lives in political and emotional exhaustion. It is in this context that the Presidential Elections emerge, with the governing bodies of the PS resigned to the hand they have left, supporting a candidate who is not convincing even within the party itself. Reinforcement, this is not about Insurance, it is about a Left trapped in its labyrinth, without muscle or imagination to point a way, a Left that lacks a mobilizing project, an epic narrative, a disruptive energy. In short: something and someone that makes you believe again.