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France will enter a new partial blockade. Schools remain open. Angela Merkel announced the closure of restaurants and bars in Germany. Ursula Von der Leyen came to tell Europeans to prepare “for a different Christmas”. After the cancellation of Easter and the travel ban next weekend, “banning” Christmas is unimaginable, but it can happen. Unfortunately, we live in times when everything, even the unimaginable, can happen.
The uncertainty is dramatic. Portugal once again broke a record for infected. The most recent figures were not seen in the first wave. The government is preparing new measures and will fight as hard as it did in the first wave not to declare a state of emergency. Costa will hardly do like Merkel and will close the restaurants: if she does, she will be full of a sector that is fundamental to the country’s economy, which was greatly affected by the first containment. But we don’t know. No one knows much about how the pandemic might evolve until a vaccine is found.
This is the framework that makes it difficult for the Portuguese to understand that a political crisis simply did not happen because two unregistered MPs wanted it. The Left Bloc will have a lot of work explaining the vote against because, regardless of their motives, the focus of ordinary people is right now on the health crisis, on how to avoid disease, protect the elderly and keep their jobs of work. The government cannot fall, now. The violence with which Ana Catarina Mendes addressed the Left Bloc yesterday shows that the Socialists know that, for now, public opinion is on their side. Nobody wants to be without a government, or with a government on gas, when people’s concerns are focused on a fundamental objective: how not to get sick or contaminate others.
While talking about the state budget “out there” [é a expressão com que os açorianos se referem ao continente], the Azores had elections for the Regional Legislative Assembly. The decline of the PS, after 24 years, is not surprising, and even so it was the most voted party. The long-term management of the PSD “only” lasted 20 years. The question now is whether the PSD gets parliamentary support to govern as Costa did in 2015, with the support of a right-wing majority, including the two deputies that Chega managed to elect. This is the most relevant political event in recent days, while the PCP disappeared from the regional assembly. The reconfiguration of the right, with the arrival of the extreme right -but also with the entry of the Liberal Initiative to the new parliament- is a totally new fact in a region where the PSD was absolute and the CDS residual just over 20 years ago . We must be aware: the Azores may be the political laboratory for a future alternation of power in the Republic.
