Constitutional crisis looms after anti-austerity Left is denied parliamentary prerogative to form a majority government.
Portugal has entered dangerous political waters. For the first time since the creation of Europe’s monetary union, a member state has taken the explicit step of forbidding eurosceptic parties from taking office on the grounds of national interest.
Anibal Cavaco Silva, Portugal’s constitutional president, has refused to appoint a Left-wing coalition government even though it secured an absolute majority in the Portuguese parliament and won a mandate to smash the austerity regime bequeathed by the EU-IMF Troika.
Greece gone exponential. Dictatorship descends on Portugal! Democracy in the EZ implodes.
Democracy must take second place to the higher imperative of euro rules and membership.AEP summarizes:
Europe’s socialists face a dilemma. They are at last waking up to the unpleasant truth that monetary union is an authoritarian Right-wing enterprise that has slipped its democratic leash, yet if they act on this insight in any way they risk being prevented from taking power.The term "authoritarian Right-wing enterprise" sounds like fascism or dangerously close to it.
Brussels really has created a monster.
The Telegraph
Eurozone crosses Rubicon as Portugal's anti-euro Left banned from power
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
10 comments:
They done gone totally texas.
International agreements and organizations don't supercede Democracy, they are produced by it.
But isn't this what you've been saying would happen at least implicitly, Tom? Democracy is incompatible with capitalism meme leads to non-democratic governance. In most of the articles you've posted, they had implied that capitalism would fail and people would rally around left leaning government but we are seeing is that capitalism is winning and right of center governments are folding with only small backlashes from weary citizens that are less and less easily suppressed as anger and frustration grows at poor economic outcomes.
Nice one Bob! It's totally texas in euroland!
The only solution is the dissolution of the eurozone. As fanciful and far-fetched as that sounds, further political integration is a far bigger fantasy. And I simply can't understand why further integration would even be desirable. At this point, no one can say with a straight face that Europe is a democracy. It's really in your face now. Oh how I would love to be a fly in the room during meetings of EU leaders. The torture that's been imposed on European peoples.. revolutions have been fought for a tiny fraction of that.
The delusions of pro-euro sectors are simply astounding. Just keep bleeding the patient.
International agreements and organizations don't supercede Democracy, they are produced by it.
Rodrik's trilemma.
But isn't this what you've been saying would happen at least implicitly, Tom? Democracy is incompatible with capitalism meme leads to non-democratic governance. In most of the articles you've posted, they had implied that capitalism would fail and people would rally around left leaning government but we are seeing is that capitalism is winning and right of center governments are folding with only small backlashes from weary citizens that are less and less easily suppressed as anger and frustration grows at poor economic outcomes.
What I have been saying is that "capitalism" defined as prioritizing financial and real means of production over "labor,", that is, people, chiefly the producers-consumers, and "land" as the environment is incompatible with democracy as social and political liberalism, owing to a variety of reasons that I and many others have laid out previously.
Liberalism as presently conceived, with economic liberalism having a higher priority than social and political liberalism, is beset with internal contradictions that render it illiberal in implementation, owing to the asymmetry it is based on and the asymmetry it produces, intentionally benefitting a privileged class.
This results in social and political disfunctionality even in the best of economic times if only because full employment is perceived by economic liberals to be inflationary and therefore destructive of financial capital.
This is the "trilemma of liberalism." It comes down to where the power lies and whence it arises. When capital is privileged as a factor owing to putative scarcity and ownership owing to putative efficiency, then power arises from and resides with real and financial wealth.
The result is plutonomy in which wealth is in control socially and politically, since it controls the institutional structure and also largely determines culture.
BTW, that this article was written by very conservative AEP and published in "The Torygraph" itself says something. Read the whole piece.
General elections in Spain in a couple months... Things are starting to get interesting, when the next recession hits (2016 before US presidential?) things are going to blow up quite fast.
We are ready for the second phase of the crisis after 2008 period.
To be fair it's a bit sensationalist.
There wasn't a left wing coalition. As usual the left parties couldn't agree on anything. So the president did what he had to - offer the opportunity to form a government to the largest party.
All AEP is sensational. That's why we love to hate him.
The quotes from the president speak for themselves. Outrageous.
It's a bit more than sensationalist, it's wrong.
Very similar to the UK Election in 2010. The largest party were the incumbent PSD who have first dibs on putting a coalition together and getting a budget through which is really the delay. If they can't then the 3 left parties get a chance.
I am more than happy to have a go at the lack of democracy on the EU but this has nothing to do with them it's purely internal. AEP jumped the gun here.
Funny thing is as a Brit that with our first past the post system the UK wouldn't be allowed in the EU if applied to join now as our system considered not democratic enough.
Post a Comment