Is There a Left Case for National Pride? The Patriotic Discourse of the Communist Party in Portugal

In the last decade the scholarly interest in Europe’s radical left parties has been relatively on the rise, leading the literature on the European radical Left to consolidate. Yet, there is an important area of research that remains mostly omitted in the existing scholarship, namely how the radical Left engages with national belonging and identity. Despite being largely overlooked in academia, this is a relevant aspect when studying radical left parties’ identity and concrete politics, because it intersects with their ideological positioning and their strategic reflections. It is an academic shortcoming that this paper tackles by focusing on the patriotic discourse of the Portuguese Communist Party, a radical left party that was founded in 1921 and is currently present in the Portuguese national parliament. Although there is scholarly consensus that national pride is far from being a common trait of the European radical Left, there are some actors of this party family that do lay claim to patriotism. Among them, Portugal’s Communist Party stands out for being a relevant parliamentary force that has historically displayed a clear-cut patriotic discourse, as their long-standing party slogan “for a patriotic and leftist politics” already evocatively indicates. But how exactly does the party articulate its patriotism? What are the meanings that Portuguese pride and identity assume in its radical left discourse? As nationalism studies indicate, national pride is not univocal, as its meanings can change, and be contested, according to different political articulations. Accordingly, this article deploys a thorough qualitative discourse analysis in order to study how the Portuguese Communist Party engages with patriotism and articulates national pride and identity in its political communication. The corpus is based on a set of forty selected leaders’ speeches and party’s official communications. As the empirical analysis indicates, the party displays a social patriotism that defines the Portuguese nation in inclusionary terms and empathises the close bond between social policies and national sovereignty. It is a type of patriotism that finds its political legitimization in the legacy of the left-leaning 1974 Carnation Revolution, as well as in the national tradition of Portuguese communism. In the party communication, national interest coincides with the interest of the working people, which can only be achieved through patriotic left-wing policies. This notwithstanding, the patriotism of the Communist Party remains more sedimented and ritualized than politicized: national belonging emerges more as a shared sense of community rather than as a terrain of identitarian conflict against political adversaries. Cultural, symbolic and political references to Portuguese identity are frequent in the party narrative, yet they remain scarcely confrontational and fit into a context of low politicization of Portuguese identity.