Thursday, March 28

Portuguese voters in COVID quarantine can vote at polling stations


Portuguese voters in COVID-19 quarantine will be able to visit their polling stations on January 30, but have been urged to do so later that day.

The vote later this month will elect 230 lawmakers to the Republican Assembly, Portugal’s parliament.

The Ministry of the Interior announced on Wednesday that voters in quarantine “will be able to leave their place of confinement this day, strictly, to exercise their right to vote.”

Authorities are calling on COVID-19 positive voters to attend their polling station during its last opening hour to minimize contact with other voters.

During the municipal elections in September and the presidential elections last January, which were held under a strict general lockdown and when the country was hit hard by the pandemic, this possibility was not available.

“The problem we had in the previous elections has been magnified because now we have many more people infected,” said Interior Minister Francisca Van Dunem.

Omicron sweeps

Portugal recorded more than 52,500 new infections on Wednesday, a new pandemic record attributed to the spread of the Omicron variant.

Some 600,000 people are in quarantine, two-thirds of whom are potential voters out of a total of 9.3 million registered voters in Portugal.

Portugal currently ranks fifth in the European Union in the number of new cases detected in the last two weeks, but is only 17th in terms of the number of deaths relative to its population thanks to its record vaccination coverage: 82, 9% of its 10.3 million. the population is fully vaccinated.

Authorities have opened early voting and some 200,000 voters, including outgoing Prime Minister Antonio Costa, have already registered to vote next Sunday, a week before the official election date.

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The vote comes two years ahead of schedule, after parliament rejected the minority socialist government’s 2022 state budget in November and the country’s president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, called early elections.

The state budget is particularly important now because it sets out how billions of euros will be spent in aid from the European Union to recover from the pandemic.

The left hoped to win

Costa’s Socialist Party (PS) is projected by a Pitagorica survey released on ThursdayY to come out on top with 39% of the vote, followed by the Social Democrats (PSD) with 30%.

But the Socialists could once again fall short of an outright majority, forcing them once again to seek support from their centre-left allies, the Left Bloc and the Portuguese Communist Party, who are expected to respectively secure the 5.1% and 5.3% of the votes. vote, pass laws in parliament.

Parliamentary votes from those two parties helped keep the Socialists in government, relegating the center-right PSD, the country’s other major party, to the opposition.

The election could see an increase in the influence of smaller parties, including the populist Chega! (Enough!), which won a seat in parliament in 2019, but could easily outperform it this time. chega! he currently ranks third in the polls at 7.2%.

Portugal’s death toll of 19,400 is much lower than neighboring Spain, where 91,437 people have lost their lives. Authorities have attributed the low death rate to initial measures, including border closures and strict lockdowns.




www.euronews.com

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