Since the opening of the polling stations at 8 a.m., the entire Portuguese left has been trembling. Hounded in the polls by the right, Socialist Prime Minister Antonio Costa is playing for survival this Sunday in high-risk early legislative elections where the far right could make a breakthrough. When the date of the elections was fixed, three months ago, the polls gave the Socialist Party 13 points ahead of the main opposition party, the Social Democratic Party (PSD, right).
But that advantage has all but evaporated. In the latest surveys, the PS was credited with 35 or 36% of the voting intentions, against 33% for the PSD of the former mayor of Porto, Rui Rio. Faced with this gap, the pollsters reserved their forecast and declared a “technical equality”. And with one in ten Portuguese in quarantine, the level of participation in the ballot, the third that Portugal organizes under a pandemic, constitutes another factor of uncertainty.
The leftist coalition broke up
Even in the event of victory, forming a new coalition to govern may not be easy. Having come to power in 2015, Antonio Costa prides himself on having “turned the page on budgetary austerity” implemented by the right, thanks to the historic alliance he forged with the formations of the radical left, Bloc leftist and communist-green coalition. But, while his minority government also intended to “turn the page on the pandemic” thanks to record vaccination coverage and the arrival of European funds from the post-Covid recovery plan, these parties rejected his draft budget for 2022, which led to the calling of early elections.
The government’s record “is not very good, but with the Covid we cannot expect much better”, believes for her part Isabel Rodrigues, a fifty-year-old living in Lisbon. Despite a “certain disenchantment” with the Socialist Party, the majority of voters consider that Antonio Costa has “more skills and experience to govern” than Rui Rio, a 64-year-old economist appreciated for “his frankness and its authenticity,” explains political scientist Marina Costa Lobo. But “Rui Rio’s progress in the polls shows that people want change,” said one of his supporters, Paulo Faria, a 49-year-old restaurateur.
Breakthrough of the far right
Whatever the outcome of these elections, the political future of Portugal promises to be “unstable”, believes analyst Antonio Costa Pinto, researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon. “The viability of a PS or PSD government will depend on the abstention of the other” major party, in particular to quickly adopt an economic recovery budget, he predicts. On the left as on the right, it will be “complicated” for the moderate parties to negotiate the support of the extremes within a more fragmented Parliament, where the extreme right of the Chega (Enough) party, led by André Ventura, could become the third political force with 6% of the votes.
If the Prime Minister is reappointed, he will be able to try to rebuild the union of the left despite the failure of the last budgetary negotiations, caused according to him by the “irresponsibility” of his former allies, who demanded more efforts from him in favor of purchasing power and public services. And if the right wins, it will probably have to join the liberals who hope, like Chega, to confirm the strong progress predicted by the polls.