After having made viable the Government Programme and the State Budget, the PS contributed to the defeat of the most recent motion of censure against the government following the revelation of business dealings involving the Prime Minister’s company whilst he is in office. Despite the inflammatory declarations, the truth is only one: the PS has, once again, propped up the right-wing government.

Since Pedro Nuno Santos assumed the leadership of the Socialist Party (PS), the right has not tired of accusing the PS of being more radical than ever, or of being the most left-wing PS ever. Indeed, this was the hope of many on the left, who expected that the new leadership, coming from the supposed more left-wing sector of the PS, would rescue the party from the liberalising ’third way’ and return it to its social democratic roots – wasn’t Pedro Nuno one of the famous ’young Turks’ who during the troika period famously defended that the Portuguese government should threaten default to ’make German bankers’ legs tremble’.

This Pedro Nuno must have remained at that PS dinner in 2011. A year after the new PS leadership, everyone has realised that these hopes were completely dashed and that the story of a new more left-wing PS is nothing but a right-wing litany. In truth, the PS has been dodging raindrops whilst constantly opposing the workers of this country, and this needs to be said.

This surprises few who have followed the Socialist Party over the last 50 years. [Portuguese politics is] characterised by an alternation of the PS and [ the right wing parties] PSD/CDS in government, both having applied, however, essentially the same programme with few differences: neoliberalism. Let us remember, just to give a few examples of PS leadership, , that Mário Soares unreservedly supported joining the single currency, that Guterres frantically privatised public companies like few governments in Europe, and that Sócrates promoted dramatic cuts in the purchasing power of civil servants. Throughout this time, the PS has also always been unwilling to revoke absolutely serious provisions of the Labour Code such as the expiry of collective bargaining.

In recent years, Costa’s governments presided over chronic underinvestment in the NHS and a rapid externalisation of healthcare to the private sector. Pedro Nuno Santos himself, as Minister of Infrastructure and Housing, did very little to halt the enormous housing crisis, which is, incidentally, the largest in the OECD.

Now in opposition, the ’new PS’ seems to have not yet truly understood what this word means – or else, more likely, there is no real opposition between the PS programme and that of this government.

To begin with, what left-wing party is this that allows a highly regressive State Budget from a social point of view to pass, with enormous tax breaks for large companies and high-income individuals, because it fears being penalised electorally? Are principles and people’s well-being more important, or are polls? In the future, let us not forget that it was the PS that made this government’s programme viable and is, therefore, responsible for its consequences and results.

However, beyond the case of the State Budget, effectively more high-profile and in which the PS was under great pressure to approve, the PS has systematically aligned with the right at key moments, although this often goes unnoticed.

Recently, Pedro Nuno Santos gave an interview in which he acknowledged the ’mistakes’ of the immigration policy of the governments of which he was part. What mistakes, we might think: the weak expansion of the consular network and insufficient issuance of visas? The insufficient allocation of resources to public services for the reception, regularisation and integration of immigrants? No. Instead, Pedro Nuno decided, perhaps motivated by polls and focus groups, to align with the far-right (and the government’s) narrative on immigration.

He has definitively dropped the manifestation of interest, which although not the central mechanism for regularisation, provides essential and indispensable protection to immigrants in the absence of other responses. The PS’s retreat on this issue is a huge setback for immigrants’ rights. More than that, he also fired off the far-right talking point, taken directly from Le Pen’s manual, that immigrants ’must respect our culture and values’. These statements are nothing more than productive speech acts of the far-right to try to install the obviously false idea that cultures are static, homogeneous in all members and inherently incompatible, which is then used to defend deportations and racial discrimination policies. By aligning with these tropes, the PS is doing a favour to the far-right and dangerously contributing to xenophobic perceptions about immigrants.

The PS has also already announced that it will allow the new Land Law to pass, which, by allowing the construction of housing on land previously forbidden for that purpose, is highly problematic not only at an environmental level, but above all because it will contribute to increasing house prices even more. It is not enough to have allowed the housing crisis to reach where it has; Pedro Nuno wants to make it even worse.

In votes in the Assembly of the Republic, the PS has also joined the right to block important advances for workers, having abstained or voted against the restoration of 25 days of holiday, the extension of collective labour agreements until their replacement by a subsequent one, the strengthening of labour protection for digital platform workers, among other matters. Time and again, left-wing credentials have been left in the drawer.

Despite the apparently more progressive rhetoric, the PS has appeared as a crutch for the right and as an active accomplice in the rightward shift of Portuguese politics. In truth, the PS continues to be what it has always been: a party that, despite calling itself centre-left, does not fundamentally diverge from the right or its fundamental policies and options. For this reason, the real alternative will never come from the PS, with or without Pedro Nuno. Let us recognise this fact and make due opposition to it.

Diogo Machado

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