Elections in Portugal, Costa’s socialists have an absolute majority
Surprise victory for the socialists of the Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa who got the absolute majority to rule after having called early elections Sunday which also saw huge gains from the far right, as the official results showed. The socialists in power they obtained 117 seats in parliament out of 230, compared to 108 in the outgoing assembly.
In the absence of distribution of the four seats in the electoral circles outside of Portugal, which usually PS and center right (PSD) divide in half, thus the 230 deputies of the Portuguese hemicycle will be distributed: Socialist party (PS): 117 deputies. Gets an absolute majority.
The Social Democratic party (PSD): 76 deputies, in 2019 had 79 seats; Chega the far-right party gets 12 deputies, goes from having only one seat to being the third force in Parliament; Liberal Initiative: 8 deputies. In 2019 it had only one deputy and is now the fourth force; bloco de Esquerda (BE): 5 Members. One of the major victims had 19 deputies and PCP (communists): 6 deputies. They also go down, in 2019 they had 10.
Who is the winning socialist premier Antonio Costa?
The Portuguese premier Antonio Costa wins and goes on: the socialist who made his debut in politics at the age of 21 and who is already one of the most charismatic faces of Portuguese politics, has in fact overcome his umpteenth crisis. And this time the tireless politician who managed to overturn a defeat in 2015, forming a government with an unprecedented left-wing alliance.
He scored one victory far from obvious, given the failure of his last government: he had ‘slipped’ on the approval of the budget law and a grueling pandemic; it won the elections with a large majority and that polls were hanging in the balance. However, the vote was also marked by an advancement of the far right and does not remove the specter of political instability.
Abandoned in October by his former allies on the radical left, a crisis that triggered the vote, Antonio Costa risks, however, as in the 2019 legislative elections, to remain below the absolute majority.
And therefore in order to govern, the 60-year-old former mayor of Lisbon will have to find a difficult balance to find support in Parliament. When 56% of the votes were counted, Costa’s Socialist Party, which has ruled since 2015, is at 42%; below 30% remain the conservatives of the Social Democratic Party, led by Rui Rio and that the polls instead gave head to head with the socialists.
The political career
Pragmatic socialist, It costs came to power thanks to the radical left, forming the ‘geringonça’ (“the contraption ‘in Spanish), the agreement between the PS, the communists and the Bloco de Esquerda: divisions had been overcome in order to put an end to the politics of austerity wanted by the right in exchange for the international bailout granted to Portugal in 2011.
In 2019 it consolidated and reconfirmed the victory with a simple majority: he abandoned the ‘geringonça’, but in October he failed to get the 2022 budget approved. And if in 2019, after four years with the support of the ‘geringonça’, he was clearly the favorite in the polls, this time the polls gave him technical stalemate with the right of the Social Democrats.
Costa entered politics early: son of a communist writer from the former Portuguese colony dthe Goa (in India) and a journalist, the premier, joke his collaborators, “he drank politics in his mother’s milk”. At 14 he was pasting the posters of the Socialist Party on the street, then he decided to study law to be like Perry Mason.
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, now president of Portugal, was his university professor; he debuted as a lawyer in the office of former president Jorge Sampaio and was sponsored by the greats of Portuguese socialism, from António Guterres to Mário Soares and José Sócrates.
Married, his wife accompanied him throughout the campaign, and with two children, now the socialist leader, known for being a tireless worker, has a new challenge ahead of him: to lead Portugal on the path to recovery after the pandemic.
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