Friday, March 29

The socialist António Costa wins the elections in Portugal | International



Another victory for the socialist António Costa and another failure in the polls in Portugal. With 99% of the vote counted, the socialist candidate has won the legislative elections with 41.6% of the votes, which would place him close to an absolute majority. Far behind would be the Social Democratic Party (PSD, conservative), with 27.9%. The equality described by the polls in recent days between the two candidates has been diluted on voting day: the PS has achieved an advantage of almost 700,000 votes.

The change was already intuited with the exit poll of the Catholic University for Radio Television of Portugal (RTP), which gave the victory to the Socialist Party, very close to the absolute majority, located in the 116 deputies. With the confirmation of these estimates in the official count, the socialist António Costa (Lisbon, 60 years old) will face his third legislature with a much more comfortable situation in terms of his own forces, although in a more adverse scenario to the right due to the advance of the ultras of Chega, the third force with more than 7% of the votes with the scrutiny at 90%. On a personal note, the victory is a milestone for Costa, who could become the prime minister who has remained in office the longest since the Carnation Revolution.

The voters have severely punished the minority partners who had formed in 2015 the lowonça, the Bloco de Esquerda (BE) and the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP). Both formations voted against the 2022 Budget due to discrepancies with the PS on matters such as the increase in the minimum wage or the reinforcement of the National Health System, and they seem to have been held responsible by the voters. If confirmed, the big bump of the night was carried out by the Bloco, which remained as the third force since 2015, with 19 deputies. The party has been overtaken by the ultras of André Ventura, who had presented the overcoming of the BE as one of his main objectives in these elections, and remained at 4% of the votes, far from the 9% he had achieved two years ago years. As for the coalition formed by communists and The Greens (CDU) it had not reached 4%. The fact that its candidate, Jerónimo de Sousa, had to withdraw from the campaign to undergo an emergency intervention and only rejoined in the last few days, has also been able to contribute to the communist setback.

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The polls bet on a great tie between the conservative candidate of the PSD, Rui Rio, and Costa that the polls have disdained. With this result, the scenario of Rio at the head of the party is not entirely reassuring, since it is a slight advance in votes compared to 2019 but not in percentage. In any case, the conservative will have a less fractious parliamentary group, since it is made up mostly of like-minded, after the marginalization of many of those who supported his rival in the primaries, Paulo Rangel.

The right-wing bloc has experienced great progress in its most radical wing. André Ventura’s party, Chega, is far from the percentages that its leader had anticipated, but in any case it obtains a great result considering that it is a formation created in 2019. Its political consolidation ends the Portuguese exceptionality in Europe, since it has been one of the last countries to witness the growth of a far-right party. The Liberal Initiative also rises notably, which now had only one seat and defends ultraliberal positions in economics and liberals in social rights. The only party punished in the right-wing bloc was the Social Democratic Center (CDS), which had five seats and in the past had been a ruling party through coalitions with the PSD. With the count at 90%, he was at risk of being left out of the Assembly.

The Chamber that will come out of the polls shows a deep polarization, and maintains the pluralism that began in 2015 and was enlarged in 2019. The right wing has become more radicalized with the advance of Chega and the Liberal Initiative, while the left has moderate, with the decline of BE and PCP. Costa came out for the absolute majority and changed his speech when he saw that the polls were unfavorable to him. However, it seems that it connected with the will of the majority of the Portuguese, who have blamed the political crisis on their former partners and have granted the PS a clearer victory.

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Dating with Rebelo de Sousa in Belém

The President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, will give 24 hours of respite to the political leaders, whom he will begin receiving at the Belém Palace starting Tuesday before announcing who will commission the formation of the Government. The most frequent solution is to appoint the candidate of the party with the most votes.

The fragmentation that the ballot boxes have consolidated frustrates, in principle, the wishes of Rebelo de Sousa to achieve a government that does not depend on parliamentary lurches. This was one of the reasons that led him to dissolve the Assembly of the Republic and call midterm elections. After voting in Celorico de Basto, a small town of 2,500 inhabitants in the north of Portugal, he assured that he did not regret it and that he had dissolved the Assembly with the majority support of the Council of State. “What’s done is done. I trust the voters. Nobody has to be afraid of the votes of the Portuguese or of democracy”, he pointed out.

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