Portugal crisis election is e c

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Commissions general secretary Marcelino Camacho, has put up vehement verbal opposition to the Statute.

And the CP parliamentary group (along with Euskediko Eskerra, the left Basque nationalists) have voted against most of the clauses passed so far.

The CP's opposition, however, is not one of principle.

They support the idea of the detailed regulation of the wages and conditions of workers through bourgeois law.

And their tactics have been to make a lot of noise, and present amendments.

They are against the Statute but in favour of a statute.

The reason for this shift is that the question of the Statute has become central to the CP's new tactic of "opposition" to the UCD government and the PSOE's collaboration with it.

Condemned

Addressing the latest meeting of the CP's Central Committee, Carrillo condemned the Statute, saying that it "could hardly be implemented under worse conditions" and that the UCD was:

"imposing texts which don't go as far as the gains already made by the workers"'.

The : CP, he said, would mobilise the workers:

"including those who voted for the UCD and who must now realise that nothing bat mobilis. ation would remind their MPs what positions to defend [!] "

Masterly hypocrisy.

Carrillo, however, went. on roundly to condemn the demand " coming from many sections of the Workers Commissions to boycott the parliaThe general election to take place in Portugal on 2: December is the result of a long political crisis.

The election was called by military president Ramalho Eanes in September, when the non-elected reactionary "technocratic" government of Mota Pinto was defeated in a parliamentary vote by the Socialist and Communist Parties.

The defeat proved that no feasible government would be able to gain a parliamentary majority.

At the same time the Socialist and Communist Parties, despite their parliamentary majority, refused to contemplate forming a government fearing that this would put them under unbearable pressure from the working class to implement anti-capitalist policies.

When Mota Pinto fell, Eanes, having talked about a reimpos ition of direct military rule, decided to appoint a caretaker government under a former assaciate of ex-dictator Caetano, Maria Lourdes da Pintasilgo and call general elections.

But, if Eanes imagined that the elections would solve Portugal's political crisis, he looks like being very wrong.

•Though in Portugal opinion polls are illegal, some leaked polls done by Spanish agencies are reported to have estimated that at present well over 50% of the electorate are "undecided".

If this is anything like true it can only point to a deep and thoroughly understandable contempt for all of Portugal's political parties.

The biggest loser of committed support is very likely the Socialist Party of Mario Soares, now campaigning under the slogan "Progress, Stability and Social-Peace"

The SP's period in government-in which it consistently imposed reactionary anti-working class policies-must have lost it much of the mass support which gained it the largest number of seats in the last parliament.

If the poll figures are accurate it does not look yet as if the CP's electoral alliance, the United People's Alliance has picked up the support the SP is believed to have lost.

This is no surprise either since in spite of the CP's recent demagogic "opposition" to successive governments, the Stalinists have studiously Amid a sharpening crisis in the Basque country, police swooped and arrested at least 150 militants from left wing parties last week.

Those detained were members of Euskadiko Eskerra (linked to ETA, politico-militar) Herri Batasuna (linked to ETA militar), the Communist Movement la centrist, Maoist organisation) and the LCR (Revolutionary Communist League, Spanish section of the "Trotskyist" USFI).

The arrests took place on the same day as a general strike organised by the same groups was called to protest against the latest killing of a Basque militant by the police.

class in defence of the most basic material needs.

Revolutionaries in Portugal should call on the workers and peasants to ensure a majority for the workers' parties in the new parliament.

But this tactic should be seen as part of the fight to force the reformists and Stalinists to form a government independent of the bourgeois parties and implement socialist policies.

As they fail to do this so will they stand definitively exposed and be forced to make way for a new, revolutionary, working class leadership which can regain defend and enlarge the gains of 1974 which reformist and Stalinist betrayals have destroyed or endangered.

nilitants This latest murder was of a young municipal cauncillor who was a member of the Herri Batasuna* (Popular: Unity) coalition.

About half of those arrested have since been released.

The new detentions add to the already tense situation in Euskadi.

They are the state's reaction to a situation in which. it is already over the rack on the Basque question.

Since last weekend ETA (politico-militar) have been holding a UCD MP prisoner, demanding as conditions for his release the freeing of five longterm Basque political prisoners.

And a masive file of evidence is piling up of the continuation Pintasilgo of the most savage tortures against Basque prisoners in government hands.

The new evidence, first brought to light by an MP of Euskadiko Eskerra, has made the government squirm and has deeply embarassed its bourgeois nationalist allies in the Basque Nationalist Party:

After 3 years of "democratic" political reform, and a month after the passing of the "Statute of Autonomy" the political reality of Euskadi has not changed so much since the days of Franco. •As a common slogan. on Basque walls puts it:

"With the Statute, repression!"

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