Terry Conway from Socialist Resistance spoke to Alda Sousa from the Left Bloc in Portugal about the situation facing the organisation today. Sousa is a founder member of the Bloc and a member of its National Committee who lives in the northern city of Oporto. She was a MP representing the Bloc for five months in 2004.

Q: So what was your assessment of the Presidential election in January this year in which you gained 5.3 per cent of the vote (288,216 votes) and the former Prime Minister and candidate of the right-wing Social Democratic Party Cavaco Silva was elected with 50.6 per cent of the vote.

A: Well at the beginning of the campaign, our candidate, Francisco Louçã, said that this would be the hardest election he had ever fought, and I think he was right.

In February 2005 for the first time in Portuguese history the Socialist Party had won an absolute majority in the General Election.

In this contest, we had to explain in our literature; in the discussions we took part in on the media and in conversations with individual voters why we would not join with the Socialist Party in order to keep out the right wing. We reminded people that the Socialist Party had broken all the promises they made last time round for example not increasing pensions as they had said they would and only proposing a very small wage increases in the public sector.

Around 700,000 workers are in the public sector today and over the last eight years they have seen the value of their wages fall each year. This meant wages devalued for eight consecutive years. And now, the government proposes this year’s wage rises will only be at the same level as inflation is predicated – which in reality means they will fall again.

And the Socialist Party was not even able to present a unified candidate in this election. Mário Soares, the former Prime Minister came out of retirement and stood as the official candidate but Manuel Alegre, an MP for thirty years as well as a poet and former exile ran against him.

The highlight of the campaign was a television debate between Louçã and Cavaco. In the debate Louca was able, as many professional interviewers had failed to do, to make Cavaco state what his real policies were rather than hiding behind a load of spin.

Q: So can you explain why the Bloc is now facing a new period in its development?

A: The Bloc has existed for seven years and during that time we have fought ten elections – so the organisation has been constructed very much in this arena. In Portugal this doesn’t just mean the work you do in the election itself, but in the presidential election a huge effort to get enough signatures – at least 7,500 – to get us on the ballot in the first place.

Now we don’t expect any elections during the next three years and so we will need to use to the time to work in ways we have not been able to so far because of the pressure of elections.

The contradiction for us is that our political influence is greater than our social influence – as a consequence of the fact that we have become well known in the electoral field. So now the challenge is to redress the balance.

We are beginning to identify some areas of work on which we can focus over the months ahead. We are mobilising for the European Social Forum in Athens at the beginning of May and developing plans for the second Portuguese Social Forum in the autumn. On March 18 we will be marching against the occupation of Iraq.

We are working to organise a march for jobs as unemployment is one of the most serious problems facing the country. On a parliamentary level we will also look to challenge the Labour Code that undermines worker’s rights. The fight against privatization and for public services remain one of our priorities.

We are also looking to organise a meeting of our local representatives to try to plan their work more coherently.

Q: You were an MP for five months as part of the Bloc’s policy of rotating its representatives. Can you explain how that policy came about and what balance sheet you have drawn of this practice.

A: When the Bloc was set up we wanted to avoid a situation of reliance on a few people and to build a strong collective leadership. And for a while the Parliament was our main stage, so we wanted to give more people that experience, people from different backgrounds. We wanted to extend our visibility and not just be seen as one or two people who became well-known. But since we won eight MP’s in the General Election last February, this has been less of a danger. So while the policy has been important in the first stage of our development, it is not clear that we will continue it.

Q: Can you explain how the internal leadership of the party works?

A: We have a National Committee (NC) of eighty people that meets every two months, as well as a smaller daily leadership which meets weekly. The NC is elected on a proportional basis on the basis of votes for particular resolutions at our conference. So people are explicitly elected on the basis of the political positions they support within the party

Our statutes set out parity criteria for women’s participation in the leadership of between 30-40 per cent and this has to be adhered to by each of the slates of comrades for different political positions. There has been some debate on this question – not everyone agrees with it – but I think it is an important principle for us.

Q: Can you explain what is happening on the question of abortion; an issue that the Bloc has always made central to its activity

A: Well, yes because it’s a scandal. Thirty years after the fall of the dictatorship we still don’t have the right to abortion. In 2003 we had a campaign for a new referendum on the issue. You need 75,000 signatures for it to be presented to the Parliament and we got 125,000. But the decision to call a referendum still has to be approved by the Parliament.

In March 2004 the right-wing refused to call a referendum, with a whole lot of excuses, but actually because they were being blackmailed by the far-right. In the 2005 General Election, the Socialist Party said they were in favour of a referendum so there was a vote in Parliament which approved that it would go ahead, but then it was vetoed by the outgoing President.

Now we plan to launch a new campaign this autumn. We don’t need to collect signatures again, what we have from before still stands. We could just propose a bill in the Parliament, but we prefer not to. We think it is essential to have the popular mandate for a woman’s right to choose that a referendum victory would give. It will be important that the pro-choice movement mobilizes to support us internationally as Portuguese women really can’t afford another defeat on this key question.