There’s been a coup in Portugal! That is according to the newly trending hashtag #PortugalCoup .

Exciting stuff a coup. Jackbooted men marching around, a few mercenaries, maybe a cartoon presidential candidate, a ‘Goodluck José’ with an interesting hat that bored parliamentary scribes can latch onto, whilst catching the late autumn Lisbon sun and a glass or two of Alicante Bouschet on expenses?

There won’t be any BBC hacks covering this coup apparently, and not just because the BBC is not paying for ‘subsistence alcohol’ any longer, a move designed to help save an impressive £50 million – thirsty lot those BBC hacks.

Nope, it seems that there are distinguishing features about this ‘ere coup that has scared the BBC off reporting on it. Something to do with it being the result of President Anibal Cavaco Silva asking the party with the most votes to form a government. Eh?

In a democracy, the party with an established coalition and the most votes, in this case Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho, with 107 of the 230 parliamentary seats, was asked to form a government, and this is described as a ‘coup’? I feel cheated! Where are the jackboots, the mercenaries?

They appear to be on the feet of our right-wing, anti-EU, journalists. Louise Mensch in Murdoch’s Sun :

The Eurosceptic Left has a coalition with a majority but to protect the euro the President won’t let its leader form a government. Stuff the will of the people.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph :

Anibal Cavaco Silva, Portugal’s constitutional president, has refused to appoint a Left-wing coalition government even though it secured an absolute majority in the Portuguese parliament and won a mandate to smash the austerity regime bequeathed by the EU-IMF Troika.

Now it is true that since the election, and the realisation that none of the left wing ‘spend, spend, spend – even if it breaks up the EU’ parties had anything like enough seats to govern, some unlikely bed fellows had agreed to talk to each temporarily, if only to ensure that no one else won.

The O Bloco party, formed from the rump of the Trotskyist Revolutiona ry Socialist Party, and the ‘People’s Democratic Union‘ – itself a rag bag of Marxist Leninists and Communists. O Bloco is a founding member

of the European Anti-Capitalist Left…this is shades of the anti- gentrifrication activists throwing cereal over Shoreditch hipsters …
They have called a temporary truce with the Portuguese Communist Party – post-election, and are now screaming blue murder to anyone who will listen that they have been robbed of their chance to run the country…

Who is listening? Well if it’s not Britain’s fervent anti-EU movement!

Who would be happy to see Portugal ruled by a cabal of cut-out Russell Brand’s in the hope of the country collapsing and being forced out of the Eurozone, thus making it easier for them to campaign that Britain should get out of Europe.

That is how we end up with the unlikely sight of Louise Mensch and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard supporting Class War activists….