At the time of the last general election in 2015, Portugal was subject to the austerity imposed by the European troika. There were cuts in pensions and wages, and sharp public debates on what would come next. The Right insisted that we needed to continue the cuts or the economy would collapse, but the evidence of the last four years is that this is not true. For that reason, the Right lost part of its vote — to abstention, and to the Socialists.

Today, compared to 2015, things are, in general, less polarized. The government agreement also gave the Communists’ base the sense that the Socialists are not as right-wing as their own party usually says. This caused them to lose some votes. Our base is different than the Communists, and we also took a different approach toward the government: we did not put up any barriers to cooperation with the Socialists, but we also proved effective in confronting and challenging them.

Having supported the government for four years, we did lose some of the protest vote, also among some people who vote on the basis of single issues. Yet we also increased our support among workers, who have enjoyed gains in recent years and recognize our contribution in making them happen. For instance, after decades in which they hadn’t had one, precarious workers in the public administration finally got a contract with the state. This was huge — previously they had only experienced cutbacks. Now, many people who usually don’t vote and hadn’t previously been in dialogue with the Left Bloc have drawn close to us. This made up for many of the voters we lost elsewhere.

Certainly, the Socialist Party prefers not to have agreements with the Left. Back in 2015, we sealed an agreement because the Socialists were forced to accept one — they had come second in that election and couldn’t have governed otherwise. But this time, they came in first place, and I don’t think anyone is surprised by their choice to govern alone.

After the election, the Left Bloc again said we were ready to make an agreement — and we stand by that. But it would have been different from last time. Four years ago, we needed a minimum agreement to stop the Right, to block the privatization of roads, rail, and water, and to halt pension cuts. In today’s climate, an agreement wouldn’t have just been about stopping cuts but about rebuilding workers’ rights. The Socialist Party doesn’t want to change the labor law — and, as ever, they didn’t want to put themselves on the opposite side of business.

Now, with the minority Socialist government, we’ll have to discuss each budget and each law. We can, indeed, predict that they’ll make pacts with the Right. Portugal is one of the countries in Europe with the most precarity. Yet this government isn’t going to change the labor law — and if we don’t change that, then we can’t improve the economy as a whole.

This also means standing up for public services. Take our health-care service — one of the best in the world. It provides all available health care to anyone for almost nothing, and does so regardless of your condition, whether you’re an immigrant or a Portuguese national, and whether you’re working or not. But the Portuguese health system is also fragile and doesn’t have the budget it needs, at the same time as a growing private sector is taking away doctors, nurses, and other technical staff. So we need to fight for it — if we don’t save the system, then the social democracy that has been central to our democracy ever since the Portuguese Revolution of 1974–5 will be at stake.

I don’t see Chega! just as a far-right party. Its member of parliament, André Ventura, also has an ultra-liberal agenda to privatize health care and pensions. He does use xenophobic rhetoric, but Chega! is very much a party of the regime. Indeed, Ventura is a former city councilor for the [center-right] PSD, and during the time of the troika intervention, he was backed by prime minister Pedro Passos Coelho. He was then involved in a scandal about illegal financing. Ventura is famous as a TV football commentator, but Chega! combines different extreme discourses: it is ultra-xenophobic against migrants and ultra-liberal about the economy and cutting the welfare state.

In reality, Portugal has less immigration than we need, as well as emigrants around the world. It doesn’t have a majority of people hostile to immigrants, but it does have structural racism, which its colonialist past helps to explain. But something that is new is black people speaking up for their rights, and it’s good and important that some people are fighting to give visibility to racism and police violence. Even the Socialist Party elected a black woman in this election [Francisca Van Dunem], who has been minister for justice since 2015. Racism is still not a central issue in the public debate, but perhaps the tools exist to make it so.

Over the last four years, we passed several pieces of legislation that made clear the lack of investment. For instance, a law on the spending for the national health-care service, which cannot survive if it doesn’t have the budget it needs. Or look at public transport — we cut the cost of fares, but there’s not enough infrastructure, and we don’t have the amount of subway trains, buses, and boats that people need.

These are issues we can use to make clear the need for more investment and that the primary surplus policy is wrong. That will be the subject of a big debate. Even today [October 22], the European Commission said that Portugal’s deficit forecasts worry them. Over the last four years, the EU perhaps didn’t target Portugal so much because it wasn’t able to subject us to the same fate as Greece — it couldn’t have another tragedy, especially at the time of Brexit. Perhaps now the EU will concentrate more on us, but no one knows what will happen to the EU itself.

Four years ago, people said the Left Bloc is “against Europe.” That couldn’t be less true. We are part of the European continent, but we do need to question the EU. No one knows if the EU can last, and how, and there clearly does need to be a battle in Europe over investment.

The Left Bloc was created twenty years ago, and back then people said it would disappear because the party system is static. Yet we’re still here. And things are changing — this election saw not only the rise of an animal rights party (PAN) but also three new parties that hadn’t been represented in parliament before. Two of those three are ultra-liberal forces, which itself highlights the crisis on the Right.

Since 2015, there has, indeed, been something of a return of politics historically connoted with social democracy. In this sense, supporting the government for the last four years has definitely given us a wider platform for our message. People know our policies made a real difference in people’s lives, which made us more credible. We showed that making electricity companies pay poor people’s bills or raising the minimum wage is not some crazy utopia. This is important, because people have often said that we are lunatics, not to be taken seriously, and that what we say is impossible.

I’m not saying we determined loads of policies — we didn’t. Over 80 percent of parliament is made up of the Socialists and parties to their right, and we couldn’t and can’t do everything. People who come up to me in the street see us more as an oppositional force than a governmental one. They say, “Fight for us!”

Over the last four years, we had an agreement with the Socialists to stop pension and wage cuts. The deeper economic structure and its relationship with the banking system did not change. But we did take measures that really matter for people’s lives, and they could finally see some progress in wages and pensions after over a decade of cuts in which people felt that would have been impossible. Even though what we recovered was still too little, it has given people the sense that life can be better, and now we have more social mobilization than we’ve seen for years. Racialized people have mobilized, yes, but not only them — so, too, teachers, nurses, dockers, and more.

Supporting the Socialist government, we won gains on public services and public transport, and for the first time since the Revolution, after decades in which they became more and more elitist, university fees were cut. School books were also given out for free. By changing people’s expectations of what is possible, these changes are themselves instruments for a stronger left-wing politics.