at its best

As Rui has already announced, we will be meeting tonight to watch the PSD election. The meeting will be held at Rui's place and will be preceded by dinner (he is an excellent cook and gourmet). Two members of Portugal Contemporâneo will be absent. Ricardo is abroad and Joaquim is treating his wounds from zazie's unrelenting nalgadas. But we have a honoured guest, João Miranda, from Blasfémias.

I am very interested in the outcome of today's PSD election. The reason is that I consider PSD the most representative party of the Portuguese population and culture. It is the most open and the least ideological of all parties. Provided you do not contest the leader, you can be a member of PSD, regardless of whether you are a communist or an anarchist, a believer or an atheist. Socialists are welcome too, as are liberals and conservatives, catholics and protestants, gays and heterossexuals, prostitutes and pimps.

As I argued in a previous post Catholic peoples are not very good at ideologies. They are unable to create an ideology of their own and, when they have one, it is invariably imported from abroad. When they do embrace an ideology they believe to have found absolute truth and they rapidly become fanatical and intolerant.

PSD is nothing of the sort. Being the least ideological of all parties, it is the most tolerant of all. Most members of PSD see themselves as being non-socialists and sometimes they go to great pains trying to explain the difference between social-democracy and socialism. That is, they do not even care to know that social-democracy is a branch of socialism itself. This is PSD at its best.

A climate of division and crisis in PSD is thus, in my eyes, a very strong sign of a climate of division and crisis in the country. This is why I shall be watching very closely tonight's winner. If the winner is Manuela Ferreira Leite that means that party and country have hit bottom and may have started a process of reconstruction and reform. If, on the other hand, any other candidate wins, well, that means more trouble ahead for PSD and the country.