An Odd but Hopeful Coupling

Soares' Socialists team up with the conservatives

Even as Italy's government was falling, Portugal was getting a new one, thus ending a 41-day political crisis that began when Premier Mario Soares' minority Socialist government lost a vote of confidence. President Antonio Ramalho Eanes had asked Soares to try again. After failing to work out accords with the right-of-center Social Democrats and the Communists, Soares last week succeeded in forming an alliance with the conservative Center Social Democrats (C.D.S.). The Socialists' 102 votes in the 263-seat legislature together with the 41 votes of the C.D.S. will give the new government a majority of 23.

It is an odd coupling. Only three years ago, Soares touted his own party as the "farthest left of any Socialist party in Europe." At the same time, leftists were castigating the C.D.S. as "reactionary and a refuge for capitalists and former fascists." Both parties have since moved closer to the center. C.D.S. Leader Diogo Freitas do Amaral pointed out last week that similar alliances have worked in other countries in periods of crisis. "We can get together for a limited time to solve concrete problems," he said. "Neither party has had to renounce anything."

Nonetheless, the Communists protested that the alliance "threatened democracy" and "opened the door to the neo-fascists." Other critics of Soares charged that he had sacrificed his principles in an effort to keep his power. But the "once and future Prime Minister," as he is called in Lisbon, could reasonably argue that the alternative to a new Socialist-led coalition would be disaster. If President Eanes had decided to call for new elections, the country would not have had a working government for about six months. Reason: a census would be required first, in order to register newcomers to the electoral rolls, notably refugees from Portugal's former African territories. Furthermore, the government crisis had halted crucial negotiations in progress with the International Monetary Fund, which has demanded an austerity program to check inflation and reduce trade deficits as a condition for $750 million in emergency loans to Portugal. Said Freitas do Amaral: "By the middle of '78 we would have been on the brink of bankruptcy with our national independence threatened. The C.D.S. could not take the responsibility for pushing the country into a situation like that."

The credibility of the Socialist Party, already tarnished in leftist circles by its pragmatic moves to the right, was further hurt by a scandal involving Edmundo Pedro, who resigned last week as a member of the party secretariat and head of the national television network. Pedro was arrested for illegal possession of 35 G3 automatic rifles, various pistols and ammunition. He claimed he got the weapons from the military, which handed them out during the aborted 1975 leftist uprising. Last week the army chiefs of staff confirmed that arms had been distributed to "democratic elements" when "totalitarian forces"--meaning the Communists--threatened to install a dictatorship.

Radical newspapers of both the left and right pointed out that the populist General Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho had been condemned by the Socialists and moderate officers for condoning distribution of army weapons to leftist workers in 1975.

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