Worrying times...

Last night S and I had dinner with our favourite Portuguese judge, F. He's a great guy who amusingly talks at about a million miles per hour both in Portuguese and English, a trait which belies his roots in Alentejo. F's a really nice guy to be around and because he talks so fast we usually get through many topics. On of last night's most interesting subjects was politics. There is that old saying that politics and religion are not suitable subjects for the dinner table but we forgo these little in our house in the hopes of stimulating a little debate and quickening the blood.

The current issue in Portugal is the fact that there are elections at the end of the month for the legislature (27th September). Currently the ruling party is the Partido Socialista (PS) headed by José Sócrates, a centre-left party whose popularity is somewhat on the wane (as many ruling parties across Europe are having trouble). Their main rivals are the Partido Social Democrata (PSD) a centre-right party headed by the (eerily reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher) Manuela Ferreira Leite.

(Here's a wonderful sketch of her by the comedy group Os Contemporâneos - for those of you whose Portuguese is up to it)



Now obviously any right minded person would be horrified by the prospect of a centre-right government but here the prospect is heightened by the odd Portuguese voting system . Here we have proportional representation which allows a number of smaller parties to flourish. the main ones being Bloco de Esquerda (BE) (literally 'Block of the Left') who are a more left wing group of smaller issue (sometimes even single issue) groups who people here fear know aren't ready to rule. Then further left you have Partido Comunista Portuguesa (PCP) who are grouped together with the Greens, enough said about them but they still get the odd seat in parliament and then you have the 'far' right, Paulo Portas' Partido Popular (CDS-PP). Now there is some question as to how far right they actually are. I don't think they're quite calling for the expulsion of the Jews but they're as far right as you get here in Portugal and so they obviously attract their fair share of nutters (usually seen with 'right wing hair' and monarchist stickers on their cars).

At the moment the polls are pretty even but what this means is that should PS win they surely won't have enough seats to form a government and they've annoyed enough people over the past few years to make forming a leftist coalition next to impossible. If PSD win, which is likely, they are bound to form a coalition with CDS-PP meaning a return to right wing government, something I thought I had left behind in the UK.

S is quite worried, being a civil-servant because we all know what it means for the public sector when the right is in power, it would be really very sad if the best we could hope for was that CDS-PP weren't given influential ministries.

We'll have to wait and see but in the meantime I'm off to plan a revolution.