Evolution of left-wing political forces in Portugal (1975-2022).

Abstract

After the restoration of Portuguese democracy in 1974, the leftist political forces have suffered constant periods of crisis and their popularity has declined markedly. The Carnation Revolution, which began as a left-wing revolutionary process, ended up granting power to the typical European social democracy, which, far from solving the nation's most pressing problems, accentuated the old existing inequalities. The internal divisions among the leftist forces, the international discredit of socialism as a political system, the neoliberal and Europeanist policy applied in Portugal in the 1990s, forced the revolutionary left to reinvent itself and change the discourse, in order to be able to capture again the attention of the masses. Thus, in 1999 the Bloco de Esquerda emerged, not as a simple sum of parties, but as a new organization capable of promoting the fight against the neoliberal paradigm in a different way. Today, the Bloco is a point of reference for an important sector of Portuguese society. It stands out in the fight against the conservative restoration and bets on the failure of the bourgeoisie in the creation of a democratic development project for the country, where the Bloco has included new dynamics and alternative policies.