In the absence of assigning the deputies elected by the Portuguese living abroad -four-, António Costa has obtained a resounding electoral victory in the elections held on Sunday, January 30, by obtaining 117 deputies out of the 230 that the Assembly of the Republic.
In other words, at the time of writing these lines he already has one more deputy than is necessary to have an absolute majority in Parliament and, without a doubt, one or more of the four still in contention will go to his own party. It can be deduced from these elections that profound changes have taken place in Portuguese politics.
Results of the parties with representation in the legislative elections of January 30, 2022 in Portugal. /
First of all, it should be remembered that these are early elections, the product of the dissolution of Parliament on December 5, 2021 by the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, in the exercise of his powers. The reason for this measure, the use of the so-called “atomic bomb” in Portuguese political jargon, was justified because the second Costa Government, whose legislature began in 2019, had not managed to get the general state budgets approved for 2022.
Costa had a minority government and, therefore, needed external parliamentary support. Obtaining this support had already been complex in the two previous exercises, but this time none of the parties located to the left of the PS was willing to grant them, at least a priori, and Costa was not willing to negotiate more, not even with the Portuguese Communist Party. (PCP), nor with the Bloco de Esquerda (BE), nor with the animalists of the PAN.
Thus, it can be thought that the dissolution of Parliament, despite the rhetoric used by Costa in the chamber, appealing to the disastrous nature of an electoral process in conditions of a pandemic and economic uncertainty, was something sought by the Prime Minister. At least that’s what the BE and the PCP thought because they didn’t want dissolution, but negotiation, and it caught them completely by surprise.
Something exceptional in Portuguese politics
Contrary to what one might think, this circumstance – that the PS seeks parliamentary support in the groups of the extreme left – was not something normal in Portuguese politics, but rather exceptional. So rare that it had only happened once and that was quite recently, in 2015.
The Portuguese party system was born in peculiar, revolutionary circumstances, and was not structured, as in Spain, around the left and right axis on a shared constitutional consensus, but was divided from its origin between the supporters of a socialist revolution and the defenders of a western democracy.
The BE and the PCP belong to the universe of the first group; while the PS, the PSD and the CDS-PP were part of the latter. The former have permanently had around 20% of electoral support and the latter, 80%. Consequently, supporters of democracy have monopolized the Government since the 1976 elections and the former have never been in democratic governments (although they were in the provisional ones prior to the aforementioned elections).
Contrary to what one might think, this has meant that the right has participated in all the coalition governments in Portugal and that there has never been a left-wing coalition in the country. The PS has governed in coalition with the CDS-PP, and with the PSD, but never with the PCP or the BE. The system worked under two unwritten rules: the party with the most votes would always be allowed to govern; and the democratic parties had to seek support to form a government among themselves and not by recourse to the revolutionaries.
All this changed in 2015, when António Costa brought down, shortly after being established, the second government of Passos Coelho, the PàF, PSD and CDS-PP coalition, which was in a minority in Parliament; and he was able to sustain his own government with separate legislature agreements with the BE, the PCP and the PAN.
The first revolutionary supports of the PS
For the first time in history, a PS Government found its parliamentary support in the revolutionary left. Costa completed the legislature and in the 2019 elections the PS became the first force in the Assembly of the Republic, although still in a minority, because it needed ten more deputies to have a majority in the chamber.
The PS did very well with the so-called “geringonça” government, but its partners did not so well: the PCP was severely punished at the polls, lost five deputies, and the BE stagnated. Hence the communists’ reluctance to continue collaborating with Costa.
However, the leader of the PS had achieved something unprecedented, a connection with the electorate located to his left that made the votes of the universe of the revolutionary parties reach the PS for the first time. In this second Costa Government, as there are no legislature agreements, one can no longer speak of “geringonça”. Costa was preparing to grow on the left.
These elections in January 2022 have confirmed this new situation and in doing so have produced a total mutation of the Portuguese political system as we have known it until now. The BE and the PCP have bled to death in favor of the PS, the former having lost fourteen of the nineteen seats it had and the latter six of the twelve it had left.
This movement was somehow made possible by the policy devised by Costa in 2015 to break with the Portuguese tradition of government since 1976, but was also encouraged by the arrival of a national-populist party, Chega, which made the path opened by Costa towards that electorate was traveled by its voters in the face of what the polls announced as a right-wing government supported by some radicals who, in addition, demanded to have ministers in the Government.
The extreme right weakens the right
But Costa’s triumph has not only affected the left. Chega has weakened the government’s right by becoming a third force; has made the PSD, which experienced the dream of some favorable polls, return to its leadership crisis and has produced, above all, that the party that historically faced Portugal’s socialist drift, the CDS-PP, has been left out of Parliament and could disappear.
In addition, as if the center-right had little, the Liberal Initiative (IL), a new party that entered Parliament in 2019 and defends the same as the liberal sector of the PSD, has become the fourth political force, with eight deputies. .
In short, these elections indicate that the Costa project has triumphed and that the Portuguese political system born after the first legislative elections has changed completely and with no possibility of going back.
The left has been grouped for the first time within the PS and the right has imploded into three parties, taking the historic CDS-PP ahead, which in the distant time of 1976 had 42 deputies.
This article has been published in The Conversation
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