Translated "Avante!" article by Angelo Alves, Member of the Political Committee of the PCP

The CDU’s remarkable outcome in the EP’s elections, hold a major importance that crosses our country’s boarders. It proves the government’s political isolation, the troikas ’policies’ condemnation, the perception that social-democracy does not fit any alternative path towards the current direction and the growing distance and dispute amid the European capitalist integration process - the European Union.

Some of these elements were present at the elections in other EU member states. As one has always stated, the deep economic and social crisis within the EU space - is - simultaneously a EU crisis in itself, regarding its pillars, policies, ideological matrix and power architecture, built up by the right-wing and social-democracy.

Therefore, the elections’ outcome prove all this. From the economic and social crisis - which is far from being settled - to the generalized social disputes, adding the political and electoral ones to the EU’s policies and guidelines. With contradictory elements, the results translate an important loss of electoral influence coming from the responsible forces for the EU’s guidelines and policies. The five EP’s greatest parliamentary groups have lost, in the whole, 104 MP. Only but the European Popular Party, only in itself, lost 61 MPs ( three times the number of Portugal’s elected MPs). At the same time, the socialists , not only have not been able to capitalize the right-wing MPs loss, as they loose six of their own. Smaller groups, but equally responsible for the capitalist integration in Europe ( Liberals, Greens and Conservative) loose 35 MPs. This is an electoral expression, asserted by the European peoples’ disaffection towards the European Union’s project.

Currently, the defeated wave with “extremisms” dangers, in the attempt, as to protect themselves from disputes, mixing far right-wing and communist, progressive and left-wing parties, which criticize the current direction. But, for ex., they hinder the large right-wing growths do not take place within the “poor” south countries, where popular masses suffer much more with the EU’s policies consequences, but instead, amid the so-called European “centre” countries, from where some of the most painful impositions come from, together with the xenophobe “official” views, supporting the colonial view, which stands within the EU. In France, Germany, Great-Britain, Finland, Austria, where that current major growth has taken place, a fact that tells a lot about the reasons, class nature and real genesis of this ideological current, to which capitalism, investigates regularly, when immersed in its own crisis and contradictions.

The electoral growth of the several communist, progressive and left-wing forces, within the most massacred countries by the EU policy, is, besides the contradictions and insufficiencies that might persist, a sign of hope for the struggle that comes next, and the GUE/NGL important growth, the PCP having been its founder, proves that very same hope.

One ought to live times of great turbulence and ideological struggle. The dominant classes will respond to these elections with more violence, headlong rush beyond, political manipulations and blackmail of considerable significance. And all that, just as dialectics teach, deepen the economic and social crisis and the contradictions. Therefore, the framework is, of the class struggle sharpening, ideological clarifying and developments, which ought to be sudden and unpredictable. And to that one ought to respond with greater social struggle, ideological offensive and major political proposals, in order to engage the peoples in the building of a real cooperation and solidarity framework, for Europe.