Portugal and Spain have had roughly the same amount of democratic experience. Here, we have 25 Constitutional Governments. In Spain there are only 15. There was, therefore, greater government instability on this side of the border. While stability, in itself, is not virtuous, its absence harms the democratic game.
Essentially, the difference in the number of Executives between Portugal and Spain can be explained by the powers and some discretion that the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic offers to the head of State. Unlike the king, the President of the Republic is a referee with the power of a player.
Furthermore, this half century of democracy in the Iberian Peninsula reveals a curious paradox: the President is often a factor of instability, because he seeks to fulfill his constitutional role; The Spanish monarch only introduces instability into the political system, when he forgets the role that the Constitution reserves for him.
Thus, in Portugal, it is of the utmost importance that the head of State understands the moderating role entrusted to him, or the neutral power he must exercise, which implies demonstrating a modicum of wisdom and institutional flair that discourage excessive use of the powers and autonomy that the Constitution grants him. The legacy of the last decade of the Presidency of the Republic makes all of this much more pressing.
I consider red lines, or sanitary cordons, wrong in principle and dangerous in the effects they produce. As far as I’m concerned, voting for António José Seguro is far from being a measure to confine his opponent. The choice to be made is simple, perfectly normal: which of the candidates has the best conditions and characteristics to perform as head of state?
If the criteria are stability, adherence to constitutional precepts and adherence to the liberal nature of the Rule of Law, Insurance is the possible choice.
It won’t excite you, I admit. What can have advantages: a few years ago, in the midst of the turmoil of Brexita good English friend, tory By training and nature, he told me that he missed the times when politics was a boring thing.
The only anomaly uncovered by these elections boils down to the state of the Portuguese right as a whole, with no leadership or project. But they are beads from another rosary.
Everything else is pyrotechnics. For example, they try to convince us that there are only two ways of understanding February 8th: some insist on a confrontation between democracy and authoritarianism; others contrast it with an existential struggle between left and right.
These are quite different readings. Even irreconcilable. But they coincide in their histrionics and trickery. Many of those who today lose sleep over the threat of the radical, populist, identitarian, illiberal right, with bad international companies, did not – and do not – have any qualms about defending alliances with the radical, populist, identitarian, illiberal left, with bad international companies.
On the other side, whoever claims to shine the aura of the true essence of the right reveals himself to be as revolutionary, moralistic and tribal as the left he is attacking. There is a profound contradiction in undermining activism that struggles to impose discourse, thought and practices, and then supporting an activism that is similar in everything, just because it was born in a political field that is close to us. Puritanism, said Mencken, is defined as the obsessive fear that someone, somewhere, might one day be happy.
The same can be said about the word fascism. I am convinced that it is used more today than between the 1930s and 1950s. A century ago they knew well the sinister horror it carries, where discernment took precedence over levity. But the past was way back. If it happens again, which is unlikely, it will take the form of fraud.
The compulsion to see fascism everywhere, as well as being anachronistic, solves nothing. Note, however, the amusing irony of seeing domestic anti-fascists jostling to be “on the right side of History”, an expression reintroduced into the public debate by Ben Shapiro, the movement’s leading author. MAGA North American.
Returning to the Spanish example, but going back in time: to a large extent, the political and institutional degradation of the Second Republic, which greatly contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War, was due to mutual accusations of ‘threats to democracy’. Both, according to their respective conveniences, divided the country into good and bad. Beneath the rhetoric, no one was concerned with the Constitution, only with the demonization of opponents and the property of the regime.
Decades later, the Catalan Miquel Roca i Junyent, one of the fathers of the current Spanish Constitution, showed that he had learned his lesson: “The Constitution is not the text of a party, it is the text of coexistence.” This is it. It goes for everyone.
Political scientist.
Write without applying the new Orthographic Agreement.
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