Passos Coelho is right: stability and reforms

They expected him, like the others, to talk about “stability”. But Pedro Passos Coelho spoke about reformism. The press immediately sounded the alarm: Passos “was out of step”. Perhaps Passos really was out of step, because in this official environment of strict status quo, it is easy to be out of step. But whether out of step or not, when he spoke about “reforms” he also spoke about “stability”. Because in Portugal, if there is one thing we should have learned from the last twenty or so years, it is that there will never be stability without reforms.

Stability, both social and governmental, currently depends on reforms. Social stability is necessarily synonymous with viability. In Portugal, there are too many “systems” – health, education, social security, etc. – that need to be made viable, which can only be achieved through reforms. Without reforms, doubts about these systems will tend to undermine public confidence and create a constant expectation of difficulties and collapse, as happened with the NHS over the last year. Reforms are also the key to governmental stability. When governance depends on the concertation of several parties or of several currents within the same party, a reformist pact, not least because of the bond it creates with the public, will be the only way to get diverse political groups to support a strong government.

But there will never be reforms without a reformist parliamentary majority. Reforms, however necessary they may seem to some, are divisive. They are divisive because they upset vested interests, usually the loudest ones, and because what we call reforms are liberal-oriented choices. They assume that freedom and prosperity derive from greater individual autonomy of citizens vis-à-vis the state. Not everyone thinks in these terms. The left, for example, thinks differently. No government supported by the indulgence of the left can therefore be reformist. Reforms require a commonality of views that is only possible between political forces that are currently on the right. The combinations between right and left produce what we see in Germany: a government that is crippled from the outset.

Therefore, there will never be a reformist majority in Portugal unless the leadership of the largest party on the right, for now still the PSD, has the vision and authority required to bring together a now plural right wing in order to support a well-ordered effort for change. Without vision, there will never be a reformist impulse that can mobilize the various political groups, and without authority, no one will be able to lead them. The great political problem in Portugal at the moment is that the current leadership of the PSD has neither vision nor authority. It has never had vision, reducing its governance from the outset to an imitation of the type of political dominance of the PS, and authority, if it ever had any, it lost it due to the Prime Minister's decision not to separate business and political career.

The faithful of the situationist movement will continue to repeat the cunning mantra that “the country does not want to change”. If the country did not want to change, we would still be governed by the Socialist Party. The country knows that it has to change. In fact, the country is changing, under pressure from ageing, migration, economic stagnation and international turbulence: the issue is no longer to change, but to achieve, in a controlled manner, in the midst of the ongoing transformations, the adaptation that best suits society. Reforms are not an alternative to keeping everything the same, but to the chaos of uncontrolled changes. Therefore, the country’s misfortune lies in this fatal sequence: the PSD, because of Luís Montenegro, is not capable of leading a reformist majority, without this reformist majority there will be no reforms, and without reforms there will be no stability, no matter how much they talk about it.