European Rulers

Scan page 2

Senor Mota Pinto, the ex-official of the Salazar dictatorship who is now Portugal's non-elected Prime Minister, was echoing the sentiments of growing sections of the European capitalist class when he said last weekend™ that the continued existence of political parties was an obstacle to what he calls "democracy" -meaning capitalism.

Mota Pinto was smarting under the defeat in parliament of his government's one major piece of legislation-a super austerity budget designed to satisfy the IMF, which through loans is keeping Portugal's leaky economy just afloat.

Pressure

The defeat came about as a result of mounting pressure from the masses of workers and peasants against the reactionary policies of the regime-real wage cuts and unemployment for the workers, forcible removal from redistributed land for the peasants and rural workers.

Workers' anger against these measures forced the Portuguese Stalinists to vote against the budget and the Socialists to abstain.

The right wing Social Democrats also abstained, while only the other bourgeois party, the Christian Democrats voted in tavour.

The cowardly abstention of the Socialists was designed to justify their sulequent position -that the vote did not oblige the Mota Pinto government to resign.

Resignation

Had the : Socialists voted against, then the pressure on them and the CP to form a government in the interests of the workers would have become enormous.

Mota Pinto handed in his resignation to the military President Eanes, who prevailed on him to stay on and have another try at getting a slightly modified budget through.

He might still do this, since the Socialists have hinted they might support a budget which reduced the tax on the annual wage bonus received by Portuguese workers below the proposed figure of 65%.

Losing patience

The Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces have also begun to make it clear that they are beginning to lose patience with the failure of the parliamentary system to produce a stable lumni of rule.

The democratic gains of 1974 are now more in jeopardy than ever and that is largely because the CP and SP leaders refuse to mobilise the masses in their defence.

If Mota Pinto's next budget also fails, then the bourgeoisie will be faced with the alternative of intervention by the army, air attorius so on. ams an attemnt to set uD a new parliamentary party government (which they abandoned last year) or to hold general The last course 100ks as • r when ar if it Andreotti The inability of the National Party government in South Africa to contain the Information Departwould resolve nothing for the bourgeoisie and perhaps make it even more difficult to hold down the working class through the methods of "democracy".

In other West European countries as well as Portugal general elections are clearly not the periodic strengtheners of stable parliamentary democracy which the bourgeoisie held them to be in its days of confidence.

They are desperate last alternatives used when every other tactic has failed, and they carry the threat of confirming or enlarging the government crises which already exist.

In Italy the totally predictable defeat of Andreotti's coalition with the Social Democrats and Republicans (by a combined vote of the Communist and Socialist Parties) will almost certainly force the Italian bourgeoisié to hold general elections, probably on June 10.

Belgium

In Belgium, too, attempts to reconstruct the coalition' between Social Christians and Socialists broke down last week on the intractable issue of the Details of their have been circulating few weeks.

- Not surprisingly, it seems that large sums of money were