These have been a rather busy weeks, since this is the most dreadful month of the year for those, like me, that take part in some sort of power. Being a member of the local government (we call if Freguesia, for what I could determine it’s called Civil Parish in the UK and village Townhall in the US, but I can be mistaken) these days I have been busy with meetings, voting and discussion due to our budget for 2020.
These take place after my work journey, on my own time, and tend to end around midnight, sometimes even later, and since we are a centre-Left party we have to discuss pretty much every single point of the budget from things as simple of how much we spent in staples and paper, how much does our website layout cost to major issues like social assistance to the elderly, the poor and staff wages, and these things have to be discussed with our opposition both on the Right (the Christian-Democrat Conservatives of CDS/PP and the Liberal-Conservatives of the PSD) and on he Left (Left Bloc, Communist Party and a local independent elect).
We have the majority of the vote on the local assembly, and since we came to power here we have decided to work closely whenever possible with the elects of the Portuguese Communist Party, on the last mandate the PCP was even included in our executive, this time we presented a budget they could compromise with and vote favourably.
The Socialist Party in Portugal has been a full Centrist and Third Way party for decades, but thanks to António Costa and a handful of national and local leaders on the previous elections the Left wing of the party gained some momentum. Sadly that is no longer the case, the Socialist Party decided not to compromise with the parties on our Left after the results on the last elections, but these being Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders times some of us are still fighting the good fight within it and locally to keep the party on a Left leaning direction.
My point being, that due to my duties on local government I was unable to blog as often as I wanted and even less of tweeting as interestingly and combative as I should.
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