There was an unfounded expectation for this year’s election that the PCP was going to disappear while the Left Bloc would do at least a little better. That didn’t happen: the Communists got just under 3 percent of the vote, while the Left Bloc fell to 2 percent. This testifies to the resilience of the PCP — a resilience in decay, but still some kind of resilience.
The Left has now been reduced to its bare bones. The people that are on the Left today are the ones who will vote for the Left no matter what. The vote for the Left Bloc is lower than its starting point back in 1999. We need to have deep strategic conversation about what the experience of the Left Bloc meant. In my opinion, it was not the form of the party that was a problem in itself. It was more importantly this specific experience with power.
Every time the Left comes near power, it has to make complicated choices. When you lose sight of forms of rupture and forms of counterpower rooted in strong labor and community organizations, this is what is going to happen. Either you are going to transform into the party that you were able to supplant, like Syriza in Greece, or else you are going to lose support and end up in a position like the Left Bloc, reduced to 125,000 votes.
Another problem is that when these debates are happening in the heat of the moment, they are not very helpful. This is a debate that should have started before the moment came. It didn’t, so it ends up being very hard because you’re navigating and trying to survive.
We can point out some things that are important and that the Left has been engaging with. The question of housing is definitely a big one: it’s an unsolved crisis that is getting worse. The right wing has no answer to it, because the idea of building private housing while the prices are completely insane, with no form of control and no public ownership, is not going to resolve the crisis. This is a question that might give the Left some…
Auteur: Catarina Príncipe
