🇵🇹 Portugal's politics and elections 3.0

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Air France-KLM, Lufthansa Group and IAG (British Airways/Iberia) would seem to be the only obvious bidders for TAP, now the middle eastern carriers have been burnt by their investments in Europe. Lufthansa seems the most logical, given existing cooperation and alliance ties, plus it fills a void for the group.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Extremely DUMB move to resign if you didn’t do anything wrong, though expected considering how weak and no-pulse European left tends to be. I get doing it if you know you’re guilty and is a matter of time to be caught, so you want to take your body out of the center of attentions. So when Costa resigned, I thought he might be guilty but still had the possibility of European Left being European Left again in the back of my mind.

Given President Marcelo has the unilateral authority to call a snap election, and I suspect he’d have triggered it if Costa failed to resign, I don’t think it really matters.

The real question for PS is whether Costa would perform better than a new leader in snap elections, and given the state of his cabinet that doesn’t seem likely, so he probably needed to be disposed of.

And the tens of thousands of cash seized from his chief of staff’s office indicate even if this was a mistake he’s got something murky going on.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

I follow Portuguese politics pretty closely but have always wondered why Madeira is so much more right-leaning than the Açores. Is it because Madeira has historically been better off economically?

Well, 50 years ago, Madeira was as poor as the Azores. I would say that Madeira was marked by the tenure of Alberto João Jardim and the way he managed the islands, plus shaping the PSD as the "the party of the autonomy of Madeira", while the PS was always lost and was perceived as close to the central government, which in Madeira is basically a capital sin. In the Azores, I think it's different. There's not that much antipathy towards the central government, plus, the PS, unlike Madeira, always had a strong presence in the islands. But, yeah, maybe the economic background of both islands explain the different political systems and the way they interact with the central government.

I’ve seen it mentioned before, what’s the origin of Madeira’s hostility to the central government?

[AustralianSwingVoter]

That's British Tory levels of impending age divide doom. Didn't quite realise PS were Sunak levels of utterly hated by young people.