CALDEIRÃO DE BOLSA

Financial Times Escreveu:Barroso's role in the proletarian struggle

Like many children of the 1960s, Jose Manuel Durao Barroso, the European Commission president, was a youthful communist. Now firmly on the centre-right, he explains his Maoism as a natural reaction to the autocratic regime running Portugal at the time. The young Barroso was a radical student leader during the Carnation Revolution of 1975 and some footage of those turbulent times has surfaced on YouTube recapturing those heady days. It’s certainly a far cry from pushing paper at the Berlaymont and may not be a time Barroso wants to remember. However, though the clip has disappeared from YouTube, he won’t be able to forget it. A Portuguese MEP has emailed it to the entire staff of the European parliament.

Since I don’t know the Portuguese for proletarian, I will let Miguel Portas, the MEP in question, take up the story.

It is 1976 in Portugal, and the rising star of the Marxist-Leninist Student’s Federation – FEML-, the youth structure of the Reorganising Movement of the Proletarian Party – MRPP, is explaining that imposing the so called “student civic service” is “the evidence of the crises of the bourgeois education system”, and therefore, “an anti-proletarian and anti-popular measure”.

“This act meant the establishment of yet another year between the secondary education and University. In 1975, just after the Carnation Revolution, the Portuguese universities did not have the facilities to incorporate the enormous amount of applicants."

There is some history here, since Portas himself was a member of a rival faction of the endlessly-splitting left. He was a member of the Communist party’s student committee, though later left to help form the Left Bloc, which he represents in Brussels.

“Durao Barroso was fighting for the insertion of the discipline of Marxism, Leninism and Maoism on the Law degree curriculum. He was standing for a university self evaluation system, were students would state if they considered themselves approved or not,” Portas adds.

It’s ironic really, since when he became Commission president he found the same system applied. He had to accept whoever the member states sent him to form his team. Rocco Buttiglione, the pugnacious Italian, so infuriated the parliament with his comments about women and gays that Rome had to recall him.