Judging Socrates is easy – the rest is difficult

At the end of September 2014, António Costa won the Socialist Party primary elections, leading the widows of Socratism who had been forced to live with António José Seguro since 2011. The primaries had been fierce, especially in the debates, with the current presidential candidate making a point of leaving nothing unsaid. Seguro had pointed the finger at the "invisible party, which has branches mainly in the governing parties, which has captured parts of the state," and announced that with him there would be a "clear separation between politics and business." The Socialist Party gave him 30% of the vote and 70% to António Costa, and the choice began to become clear from that point on.

A month later, a media controversy erupted over the possible awarding of José Sócrates by then-President Cavaco Silva. Augusto Santos Silva, an alleged former left-wing radical turned jackhammer for Socratism between 2005 and 2011, later appointed President of the Assembly of the Republic, whose national stupidity decided many years ago to formalize his intelligence despite the lack of evidence, appealed to Cavaco: "Mr. President, do not award Sócrates. He does not deserve such a stain on his record."

At that time, Ferro Rodrigues, another alleged former left-wing radical, later and equally elevated to the status of second-ranking figure in the State, was speaking in the Assembly of the Republic, as parliamentary leader of the Socialist Party, raising his voice as loudly as he could to praise José Sócrates and his record as a great anti-austerity politician – at that time, it was of little interest that Sócrates had been the one who inaugurated the austerity cycle; after four years of daily historical whitewashing in the media, who could care less?

Just over a year before the usual servants finally felt at home and glimpsed the political Olympus on the horizon, with Costa in São Bento and Sócrates in Belém, the ferocious animal had been hired by RTP to begin a career as a political commentator, which was already known to be an essential condition for leading living beings to the head of state.

On November 22nd of that fateful year, 2014, however, José Sócrates was arrested, beginning a judicial saga that now continues to entertain us. In December, António Costa visited him in Évora prison, leaving behind a trail of grease and cynicism: "His personality is known to everyone. He will certainly fight for what he believes to be his truth."

The Socialist Party (PS) was divided over what to do about its former beloved leader. Those who, like Seguro, had strived to rebuild a center-left party free from the shackles of corruption and a system of vested interests, business deals, and the cynical exercise of power were pushed aside. What remained were those who pretended Sócrates had never existed, those who isolated him in deceit, seeking to save an army of accomplices who needed to continue living politically, those who tried to sell the idea that Sócrates' trial was his alone, and exclusively criminal, those who believed that any moral, ethical, and political judgment had been made in the 2011 legislative elections, an amalgam of political orphans who ultimately found in Costa the protective mantle—and protected—of their careers and the tentacular and thorny power that the PS had wielded between 2005 and 2011.

In 2019, with Sócrates already disaffiliated from the party, distressed by the lack of solidarity from his comrades, António Costa definitively closed the matter, when the facts, regardless of their criminal nature, became known to everyone, saying that in the PS people were not aware of such facts, and that while he was Sócrates' minister, for two years, he had never had a sign that raised the slightest suspicion about his behavior.

[A special greeting to the reader who, having arrived here, still has a peaceful stomach. I suppose it's not easy.]

Costa's alleged naiveté was nothing new. In 2009, when seats in the European Parliament were up for grabs, Ana Gomes, shielding herself with the demand for exemplary punishment for corruption "so that suspicion would not hang over everyone," claimed there was "a campaign of personal attacks on Sócrates." Carlos César, known for being the patriarch of the family with the most members dedicated to public life per capita, also in 2009 stated that Sócrates was "a serious man" and considered him a victim of politically motivated staged acts in the Freeport case. In 2010, the hyperactive sportsman João Galamba asked on Twitter if anyone had yet retracted the slander leveled at Sócrates, and a day earlier, António Costa asked the country to "keep an eye on Sócrates," an example of "combativeness, determination, courage, and nonconformity."

The cover of Focus magazine on September 15, 2004, went unnoticed by everyone, where it discussed the "secret life" of the "man who wants to be leader of the Socialist Party and Prime Minister of Portugal": "he lives in a luxury building, lives the life of a rich man and declares his salary as a member of parliament as his only income." Nobody knew anything, after all, as António Costa stated in 2019.

Socratism was never about a single man. José Sócrates is on trial for alleged criminal offenses, but the most necessary trial is far from ever beginning. Socratism is a case of complicity among too many people who survived him with impunity. Since democracy began—thus discounting the revolutionary excesses of the PREC—the institutions and the regime have never been in such danger as they were during those years from 2005 to 2011. The Public Prosecutor's Office, the courts, including the highest courts, the media, the public bank, the private bank, major national companies, every Portuguese wild duck, regulatory bodies, public companies—everything hung by a thread in the hands not of just one man, but of a large, very large group of cronies who now, for the most part, pretend nothing happened. Socratism is a way of being. Of censorship, control, manipulation, narratives, post-truth, lies, telegenics, and comradely silences. Socratism was not an isolated act. It was, and is, a style, a culture, a way of operating power in Portugal, and it outlived the leader of its golden age, now disgraced. The trial that was required was not a criminal one—that should be carried out by those who must, in the name of the people, and its consequences do not erase the need for political judgment. Indeed, the same country that now revels in the voyeurism of the judicial process and insists on beating a dying man is the same one that went along with, and continues to go along with, the political and institutional deception. Journalists, commentators, politicians, all those who preferred the comfort of complicity to the courage to defend democracy and institutions, and who continue their lives there, reporting news, commenting on politics, leading public companies, spread across the state, with their little appointment order, regulators of this and that, so many perched in chairs in television studios, none of them has been or will be held accountable for the damage they have caused to the country.

Socratism, that style, that web, that filth, didn't die in 2011, nor was it born in 2005. It's alive, remains unaccountable, and continues to benefit from their complicity. Judging the man is easy. Judging the system that empowered and protected him is another matter entirely. And there aren't many people with the authority to do so.