Portugal about the situation facing the organisation today. Sousa is a founder member of the Bloc and a member of its National Committee who lives in the northern city of Opporto. She was an MP representing the Bloc for five months in 2005. Q: So what was your assessment of the Presidential election in January this year in which you gained 5.3 per cent of the vote (288,216 votes) and the former Prime Minister and candidate of the right-wing Social Democratic Party Cavaco Silva was elected with 50.6 per cent of the vote. A: Well at the beginning of the campaign, our candidate, Francisco Louca, said that this would be the hardest election he had ever fought, and I think he was right.
In February 2005 for the first time in Portuguese history the Socialist Party had won an absolute majority in the General
In this contest, we had to explain in our literature; in the discussions we took part in on the media and in conversations with individual voters why we would not join with the Socialist Party in order to keep out the right wing. We reminded people that the Socialist Party had broken all the promises they made last time round for example not increasing pensions as they had said they would and only proposing a very small wage increases in the public sector.
Around 700,000 workers are in the public sector today and over the last eight years they have seen the value of their wages fall each year. This meant wages devalued for eight consecutive years.
And now, the government proposes this year's wage rises will only be at the same level as inflation is predicated - which in reality means they will fall again.
And the Socialist Party was such a poisoned chalice. Then former Prime Minister Mario Soares decided at the last minute to come out of retirement and stand against him.
The highlight of the campaign was a television debate between Louca and Cavaco. In the debate Louca was able, as many professional interviewers had failed to do, to make Cavaco state what his real policies were rather than hiding behind a load of spin. Q: So can you explain why the Bloc is now facing a new period in its development? A: The Bloc has existed for seven years and during that time we have fought ten elections -so the organisation has been constructed very much in this arena. In Portugal this doesn't just mean the work you do in the election itself, but in many cases a huge effort to get enough signatures to get us on the ballot in the first place.
Whereas in Britain you only need ten people to nominate you to stand as a candidate, in Portugal for a Presidential Election you need 7,500 signatures to get on the ballot.
Now we don't expect any elections during the next three years and so we will need to use to the time to work in ways we have not been able to so far because of the pressure of elections.
The contradiction for us is that our political influence is greater than our social influence - as a consequence of the fact that we have become well known in the electoral field. So now the challenge is to redress the balance.
We are beginning to identify some areas of work on which we can focus over the months ahead. We are mobilising for the European Social Forum in Athens at the beginning of May and developing plans for the second Portuguese Social Forum in the autumn.
We are working to organise something like a march for jobs as unemployment is one of the most serious problems facing the country. On a parliamentary level we will also look to challenge the Labour Code that undermines worker's rights.
We are also looking to organise a meeting of our local representatives to try to plan their work more coherently. Q: You were an MP for five months as part of the Bloc's policy of rotating its representatives. Can you explain how that policy came about and what balance sheet you have drawn of this practice. A: When the Bloc was set up we wanted to avoid a situation of reliance on a few people and to build a strong collective leadership.
And for a while the Parliament was our main stage, so we wanted to give more people that experience, people from different backgrounds.
We wanted to extend our visibility and not just be seen as one or two people who became wellknown. But since we won eight MP's in the General Election last February, this has been less of a danger. So while the policy has been important in the first stage of our development, it is not clear that we will continue it. Q: Can you explain how the internal leadership of the party works? A: We have a National Committee (NC) of eighty people that meets every two months, as well as a smaller daily leadership which meets weekly.
The NC is elected on a proportional basis on the basis of votes for particular resolutions at our conference. So people are explicitly elected on the basis of the political positions they support within the party rather than tener now well known ley are or any previous affiliation or position.
Our statutes set out parity criteria for women's participation in the leadership of between 30-40 per cent and this has to be adhered to by each of the slates of comrades for different political positions. There has been some debate on this question - not everyone agrees with it - but | think it is an important principle tor us. Q: Can you explain what is happening on the question of abortion; an issue that the Bloc has always made central to its activity A: Well, yes because it's a scandal. Thirty years after the fall of the dictatorship we still don't have the right to abortion. In 2003 we had a campaign for a new referendum on the issue.
You need 75,000 signatures for it to be presented to the Parliament and we got 125,000. But the decision to call a referendum still has to be approved by the Parliament.
In March 2004 the right-wing refused to call a referendum, with a whole lot of excuses, but actually because they were being blackmailed by the far-right.
In the 2005 General Election, the Socialist Party said they were in favour of a referendum so there was a vote in Parliament which approved that it would go ahead, but then it was vetoed by the outgoing President.
Now we plan to launch a new campaign this autumn. We don't need to collect signatures again, what we have from before still stands. We could just propose a bill in the Parliament, but we prefer not to.
Given the strength of the Catholic Church as a bastion of reaction in Portugal, we think it is essential to have the popular mandate for a woman's right to choose that a referendum victory would give.
It will be important that the pro-choice movement mobilizes to support us internationally as Portuguese women really can't
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This is the first in a series of an open debate in the pages of about events taking place in Latin America. We encourage our readers and supporters to submit "Activists in Latin America have continually tried to look to new ways to change their conditions and their governments. We in Europe and in North America have done nothing of the sort since the 1960s" those resources for the benefit of the mass of people within the current system. All of this is being done in the name of socialism.
While this may fall well short of "revolution" as we recognise it, it may result in a sort of "best case scenario". This may not be enough for those of us who desire to see a worldwide revolution, but it may be enough for the imporerished peasants and the urdan poor awenng In snanLVLUWIIS.
Why do the most politicised and inspiring movements of recent decades nave no interest in the concept oi a "Bolshevik Party" as necessary for revolutionary change? Some have argued, and continue to argue, that in every one of these examples, it is a weakness of the said reforms further still once they have basic amenities like running water and fuel.
They may succeed in creating an entirely new state out of the reforms that they have demanded, which encompass both nationalization of key resources and pursuing new international trade arrangeNICULS
Indeed, this may be more difficult than overthrowing the state and nationalization all at once, but why should this way be discounted given our historic support for the Cuban revolution, which happened as a result of guerilla warfare?
In Bolivia, at least, there are very serious divisions within the armed bodies making up the state, with the police and military coming into armed conflict in 2003 and the mili-