Portugal election: Socialists retain power with increased share of the vote
Portuguese prime minister António Costa’s Socialist party has won the country’s general election but has fallen short of an outright majority, according to exit polls.
The Socialists (PS) took 36.65% of the vote, followed by the centre-right Social Democrats (PSD) with 27.9%, according to near total results released by the interior ministry early on Monday.
The Socialists’ share of the vote was more than in the previous election in 2015 and bucked a wider European trend of declining centre-left fortunes.
The results mean that the PS, which has governed for the past four years with the support of two smaller hardleft parties, will have 106 seats in the 230-seat parliament, up from 86 seats in the outgoing assembly and just 10 seats short of an outright majority. Four seats are yet to be attributed according to the results of votes cast abroad.
The turnout was 54.5%, the lowest in a general election since Portugal returned to democracy after a rightwing dictatorship was toppled in 1974.
Negotiations to form a government will start on Monday and could last days or weeks depending on the final
result. In 2015, Costa – who had finished second behind the PSD – took less than two months to seal an unexpected alliance with the Left Bloc and Communists known as the geringonça, or improvised solution.
Four years later, however, the hardleft is pushing for increases in public spending and has accused Costa of veering to the right. The prime minister has already ruled out a formal coalition, but may try to renew his governing pact with one or both parties.
He may also have another potential governing partner in the upstart People-Animals-Nature party (PAN), which was on course to capture two to six seats, up from just one when it first entered parliament in the last election. The party has said it is ready to support Costa if he commits to its environmentalist proposals.
Costa, 58, has reversed some of the more unpopular austerity measures, including cuts to public sector wages and pensions, introduced by the previous PSD-led government in the wake of the eurozone debt crisis, while still managing to bring the country’s budget deficit down to nearly zero.
He has won praise both at home and in Brussels for combining fiscal discipline with successful measures to stimulate the economy, which is now growing faster than the EU average, helped by rising exports and a booming tourism industry that saw more tourists visit Portugal last year than it has inhabitants.
The PSD, still associated in the public mind with deep cutbacks and a three-year recession that ended in 2014, was unable to profit enough from a series of recent scandals to hit the Socialists, ranging from a nepotism row to the alleged involvement of a former minister in an army cover-up of the theft of weapons from a military base.
“The most probable outcome is a Socialist party minority government with support from radical left parties or, less likely, the small environmentalist party PAN,” said Federico Santi, an analyst at political risk consultancy Eurasia Group.