That’s actually really fucking funny. 35 bucks hmm do piñatas come with the candy already or do you have to fill it?

Ultimately the fault of the nationalist ukranian elite and the west for letting it get to this, they could’ve given ukraine an easier out right after the war began but now it’s gonna pay the price for giving russia a bloody nose and get basically no meaningful reward

Portuguese diplomats were there too and you can bet the government will barely complain about this

omg I read “Assad” instead of “Assange” and got very confused

I think you’re completely right and you made a great case why it’s silly to view the kurdish struggle as a controlled us proxy but that’s not what LoveYourself necesserily implied.

LoveYourself mentioned kurdish separatists almost “functioning as a proxy” and I think that checks out, sadly. Obviously not all kurdish groups do it on purpose, I feel for their cause in general and I do think they’re anti-imperialist (just not anti-hegemonic) but their interests often line up against america’s enemies in the region so effectively while furthering their own goals they can at the same time be furthering america’s. But from your second paragraph I’m sure you know that already.

So I think it’s fair to be a bit iffy when this type of stuff happens

Syrian Information Minister Hamza al-Mustafa said the US is not demanding normalization with Israel:

“Normalizing with Israel is not a part of the American requests sent to the Syrian government. Different delegations from the U.S., from Western countries, came to Syria and asked if you can join the Abraham Accords. The [Syrian] governmental response was also clear. The Abraham Accords are between [sic] a state, Israel, that doesn’t occupy their countries”

Hmm sounds too good to be true, could just be the syrian government feigning opposition before normalizing with israel anyways, but it does match with Trump saying he didn’t consult israel before restoring ties with Syria

BIG POST about Portugal’s elections on sunday. I wrote about the exit polls here but full results were even worse.

So the incumbent center-right PSD which called elections on itself to avoid further questions into the PM’s private business ventures (which I wrote about here and here) won the election with 32% (+3% than last time), key takeaways are that people REALLY didn’t want to have elections 3 years in a row and also that no one cares that the PM’s family business gets money from companies that also deal with the state.

Shockingly the center-left PS which had been in power for 9 years prior to 2024 basically tied for second place with the far-right CH, they both got 58 MPs and there are still 4 MPs to hand out, those belonging to the Europe and Out-of-Europe electoral districts, last years CH elected 1 MP from each of those districts while the PS only elected 1 from the Europe district, so it’s not inconceivable that the PS will be knocked down to 3rd place.

This is unprecedented and the effects are still reverberating, the PS party leader, who’s strategy was rhetorically moving to the center while being perceived by most people as being from the left-wing of the party, already resigned and the main question surrounding the party now is if the new leader will give full support to the PSD government to avoid it having to seel support from the far right or if it will be in full opposition.

Looking at the electoral map it’s easy to see what happened, while the PSD dominated the north of the country (which has always voted right wing), the PS was eaten apart in the center, south and interior by the CH. The CH also solidified itself into regions were the communist party used to be electorally strong. Key takeaway, it doesn’t matter if CH is riddled with criminals and scandals (here and here), anti-immigration and anti-migrant discourse has become VERY powerful in this country, so much that even the PSD and PS took it up in this election, with southeast asian and romani people being the key targets.

On the left the results are also sobering, the europhile pro-war greens were the only party to grow, they increased by 1%, now becoming the largest to the left of the PS, the less said about these people the better, they are a plague on the european left, I wrote about the link above about the exit polls. Really it’s surprising that portugal lasted this long without, or rather that the PS could contain inside itself for this long, a europhile-green party in a country with such huge pro-eu sentiment.

The communists did not manage to increase their vote share like people expected, in fact we lost 0.3% and around 20k votes (a lot of them due to people passing away most likely), which is less than what we lost last time, and this was despite running what was seen by pretty much everyone to be a better campaign than usual (what that really means is that the party leader did well in the interview/debate circuit). Nevertheless it wasn’t going to be easy to grow anyways and these are still tough times to be a communist publicly in the political sense, let’s hope that next time the factors that make it hard for people to vote for us aren’t as relevant, that is the ukraine war, overwhelmingly pro-eu sentiment among the population, racism (which shuts off people’s brains to proposals which materially benefit them) and the fact that it’s just not popular nowadays to identify yourself as a communist (this probably won’t change). But the results of the post-trot demsoc BE show it could’ve gone way worse for the communists.

A big upset , and usually I would be celebrating this but not this time, is that the BE, which came into the scene in 2000 to dislodge the communist’s dominance over left politics and in 2019 was the 3rd most voted party, only got 2% and only elected the party leader as an MP…wow. And it’s very easy to see why, it’s not that young left-wing (sorta), socially liberal, eco-minded people aren’t voting anymore, the problem is that…those people REALLY fucking love the EU and probably felt trapped voting for a party that, unlike the pro-war greens, doesn’t wave around the EU flag in meetings, that has always been an anti-capitalist eurosceptic party and that says it only supports arming ukraine if it doesn’t “become a war business” (wat? the communists just outright oppose arms shipments btw).

I don’t know what they’re gonna do now, there are a loft of big names and activists affiliated with the party, and in the hard left of the party the animosity towards the communist party over stuff that you’d expect from trotskyites means that they likely won’t want to enter the communist party’s coalition, but also the soft left of the party now knows that the greens are more viable electorally, it’s a fucked situation but a funny reversal that after years of discourse around the death of the communist party it’s the BE that’s on life support.

Nauseatingly, the leader of the far-right congratulated himself by saying that he “surpassed the party of Mario Soares (founder of the PS), killed the party of Alvaro Cunhal (historic leader of the communist party) and swept the BE off the map”, that second claim isn’t true but the other two…damn.

If I had to blame 1 single thing though is that the private news channels, where most people get their politics from, are completely dominated by right wing pundits, and much like Trump is beloved by media networks for drawing eyes to them, the mainstream media here ADORES Andre Ventura the leader of far-right, during the drama around his apparent health scare in the campaign trail (here the networks had fucking camera people stationed outside the hospital for hours waiting for the guy to get out, and everytime a CH guy farts they bring in pundits FROM THE PARTY to commentate on themselves. On one occasion one pundit was explaining how the rise of the far-right could be explained by the amount of media attention they’re given only to be interrupted by the anchor who had to cut to the hospital cameras because there were supposed to be updates only for it to turn out that there were no updates and cut back to the pundit to keep making his point

The right now has a 2/3 majority to alter the constitution and if they can sort themselves out will probably remove the “towards a socialist society” from the preamble of the constitution which means portugal will no longer be an AES country 😦 (sorry Richard Wolff). That’s the very least, and the preamble is only simbolic anyway, further constitutional reforms about the welfare state are far more dangerous.

Next are the local elections in september-october, these results don’t bode well for the communists who are usually the 3rd largest force in local elections, in 2021 we got 8%, especially in the south and interior where CH, who got 4%, just got a huge boost, but it’s not clear what that entails since plenty of people vote for the communists in local elections but not in the legislative elections.

And in 2026 are presidential elections where the country is likely to elect a navy guy to be president (which I talked about here)

Among leftists online I’m seeing plenty of hotheaded takes and a lot of hyperbole that could be premature (or could be presciently on point) so it’s probably going to take some time for people to settle down and have a clear view of what these results actually mean. Nevertheless that’s not a reason to stop fighting and it’s not good to feel down for too long, the struggle continues.

Democracy dies in the prostate

I think this is the first time that I understood what DAE is

It means Does Anyone Else wow

It’ll probably be fine for now, anti-trans or anti-lgbt stuff wasn’t the issue the far-right were most vocal about this time around (publicly that is, their base is very vocal about that stuff), and I assume that since that lady and her child are from america they’re probably white so the anti-immigration discourse is not about them, the far-right’s rhetorical targets are mainly roma people (who obviously aren’t immigrants to portugal), people from the indian subcontinent, people from north africa and people from the former colonies, in that order.

Even so, tbh political violence is rare in this country although there were some alarming cases of it this past year.

Oh man exit polls in portugal showing the incumbent center-right winning, which isn’t shocking, what is surprising is some of them show the center-left and far-right being neck in neck. Right-wing liberals in third place, then in fourth place the europhile pro-war greens, having succeeded in their mission of emptying out the far-left of its less radical voters by taking their program for itself while also presenting itself as safe and european.

Communists could rise a little bit, though it’s not looking likely that we’ll regain our strongholds in the interior where anti-immigration sentiment has turned the region to the far-right and tactical “anti-fascist” voting leads people to vote for the center-left.

And the Left Block, which just a few years ago was the 3rd most voted party, could end up being the least voted on the left. It’s ironic, the europhile green party has done to the Left Block and it itself did to the communist party back in the early 2000s, it came in with a bunch of positive media coverage, an image of being fresh and unimpeded by historical debates (it’s anti-ussr) and supported a similar program but less radical and so voters who used to vote for a party to their left (the communist party) shifted right to support the new one, now it happened to them and, again ironically, they could end up getting even less votes than the communists.

I’ll be happy if the communist party increases its vote share since that defeats the ever present media narrative that they’re about to just poof disappear, especially in the context of having taken a strong anti-war position regarding ukraine, which made it pretty hard to publicly be a communist the past few years tbh, and it gives us a better base to keep growing.

Though, all in all, pretty bad results for the left in general and only the pro-war greens will be heartily celebrating.

These are just exit polls but if the results are confirmed then the governmental situation will stay as it was before the elections, there is no right wing majority without the far-right, and the center right still can’t collaborate openly with the far right, so they’ll have to depend on the center-left (who are currently being lead by a guy from the left-wing of the party) to pass laws, all the while the questions regarding the PM’s personal business dealings are still in the air, though from the results it seems like people don’t really care, and really the fact that people don’t care that the PM might be corrupt will probably be the greatest factor of stability for this government to last.

Also, of note: Higher turnout than last time, fair to say that maybe in portugal high turnout favours the far right since a lot of people who don’t vote get activated by anti-immigration shit.

There are also the Six Paths of Chakr-oh wait that’s from Naruto

Sorry Aarons and Arins

Ok, didn’t know that was a bad word, I removed it

Feliz dia do bolo!

I’m not afraid of germans to be honest, I feel like I could take at least 20 of them and I’m not even a big guy, well horizontally I am but not vertically

It looks like that clip of the guy doing it, twice

For the second time this week, the portuguese Bolsonaro buckled over during a campaign event, while yesterday he was defeated by a glass of water and had to be rushed to the hospital, this time while on the street he was defeated by…sunlight? Idk either there’s actually something wrong with him or he’s faking it, you be the judge, he kept yelling “I have to take it off I have to take it off” regarding his tie.

Yes he has also vetoed a few things over the years, though IIRC his vetoes have been far less controversial because they’ve been in line with things that people believe the constitucional court would struck down anyways.

And yeah he’s a center-right guy, formerly party leader of the PSD but never became PM, who spent years as a TV commentator and through it, and willingness to kiss and hug people on the street, obtained the image of a “sweet grandpa”.

The first time he dissolved parliament was when the far-left pulled support from the socialist party’s government budget in 2021, which didn’t at all mean he had to dissolve parliament the socialists could’ve passed another budget or used a duodecimal budget of the previous year.

The result, new elections where the left got fucked and the socialist party obtained an absolute majority. Then it governed as it wanted, poorly, became embroiled in a bunch of scandals and eventually when the public prosecutor announced they were investigating the PM he immediatly resigned, which again didn’t meant parliament had to be dissolved, the party had a majority and could’ve voted in another PM, but the president dissolved parliament instead. The investigation into the PM didn’t lead to anything and he is now president of the EU council.

The elections resulted in the far-right jumping to 18% and the PSD beating the socialists by less than 1% which meant they could form the government first.

Then last month the center-right PM failed a motion of confidence over his personal business which gets a ton of money from companies that also deal with the state, and so, the president who did so much to get his precious center-right government, dissolved parliament.

Now we got elections on sunday and I cannot tell you what will happen.

Haha if only, but the military IS just a professional institution now it’s not really leftist anymore