Indeed – who can fail to yearn for a “Trot/Hoxhaite Maoist lash-up” combined with “unreconstructed Stalinists”?

A dream come true.

Portugal was a dictatorship from 1926 to 1974. The justification put forward by Salazar and, later, Caetano (and their supporters) was that Portugal would be ungovernable if it were a democracy. They claimed that the 1912 – 1926 Republic had become ungovernable. It is not uncommon to find, in some sections of the Portuguese press articles, that look back with nostalgia on the Salazar and Caetano years. They are still uneasy about a very wide range of views being expressed today and the inevitably messy business of open politics.

The PCP survives, very little changed, because it gained legitimacy by being the underground opposition to the dictatorship. The other Left parties grew out of the intense political activity 1974-76 period. It contributes to a very diverse political scene.

While some people might imagine it would be fun to have such groups winning votes in large numbers here, rather than fascists winning small numbers as at present, surely the risk for portugal is exactly that?

Any swing to the far left is caused by the same social and economic problems that could quickly reverse into a swing to the far right while people go without work or improving living conditions.

And Portugal is not alone. It is easy to forget from prosperous and much improved London that a great many capitals have not had such a prosperous decade going into the global downturn. Travel to the poorer districts of Paris, Rome, and Warsaw and it is clear that the regeneration bug of the last 20 or 30 years was not a global fashion.

Voce acha que portugues e o mesmo lingua de espanhol? Acho que nao.

Show off.

Fortunately we have babelfish…!

Not the same language, but certainly close enough in their written forms that not-overly-colloquial prose in one is pretty straightforward for a non-native who can read the other. Italian too, to a lesser extent. Just don’t expect it to be as easy to do it with the spoken language.

I will resist from commenting on Conor’s Portuguese grammar!

Can Google translate English into Portuguese, ou estou perdendo algo?

Thanks Guano. I always forget about inserting definite articles since we don’t use them the same way in English and you never hear them when the language is spoken (at least not by Brazilians). Anyway, sorry for slightly side-tracking the topic, it’s just that I am doing an intensive class here at the moment with a group of Spanish speakers from elsewhere in Latin America and it is amazing to see how many differences exist between the two languages – although everyone assumes that they are practically the same.

“Trot/Hoxhaite Maoist lash-up” isn’t really a very accurate description of the BE, IMHO. It may accurately describe the parties that joined to form it (although I thought the Maoists stayed out) but those were tiny fringe-of-the-fringe sects, and they’ve grown into the third largest party by attracting a wide range of support and membership outside of those sorts of group. A big part of their support and of the laws they have introduced are about social-liberal issues: gay marriage, abortion, protection against domestic violence, (even more) liberal drug policy.

“when you know Spanish, Portuguese gets thrown in free”

This isn’t really true.