The President of the Republic of Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, has just dissolved Parliament and called early elections for March 10, 2024, ending the socialist government of António Costa, which had a solid parliamentary majority. Within 24 hours, a judicial inquiry forced the resignation of a prime minister after a political career full of achievements and a Socialist Party (PS) government that was the envy of the European socialist family, not to mention the balance it had achieved in the elections . Public finances.
In contrast to Spanish democracy, Portuguese democracy is semi-presidential. In a situation like the current one – a prime minister resigning because he is the subject of a police investigation – the president has several options. If he had wanted to, he could have kept the Socialists in power with a new government, since they had a majority in parliament. However, this was not the case and the socialists face a major challenge. Despite everything, Rebelo de Sousa will give the party time to reorganize and find new leadership, as he did with the center-right PSD in the 2022 elections.
The big challenge for the PS will be the political contagion of corruption, which has taken several years to eradicate. He carries the legacy of former socialist prime minister José Sócrates, who was jailed on corruption charges in 2014 and is still awaiting a court decision almost ten years later. The right, and especially the radical right of the Chega party, will repeat the issue ad nauseam until the elections.
In the case of Portugal, however, the central question in the elections in March 2024 will be who has more seats in parliament, the right or the left. This was not the case until 2015, but when the PS allied with the radical left and the communists to govern after losing the elections, everything changed. For this reason, although the radical left of the Bloco and the center-right of the PSD have opened the hunt for the socialist vote, this will be the decisive element.
The PS will quickly enter the primaries to elect a new leader. If former infrastructure minister Pedro Nuno Santos runs and wins the fight, the Socialists will be able to rise to the challenge. Nuno Santos left the socialist government almost two years ago and was a critic of Costa. Nuno Santos, who is linked to parts of the party that favor alliances with the two parties to his left, could rise to the challenge.
On the right the panorama is complex. As usual, the PSD says it will not agree with the populist radical right, but will try if the conservative bloc gets a parliamentary majority. After eight years of socialist government that destroyed the association that a significant part of the electorate had between left-wing parties and the waste that led to the bankruptcy of the state during the Euro crisis of the last decade, it will be the most recalcitrant right-wing will to do so everything that is possible by reducing the PS to a permanent opposition.
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Elections in Portugal are usually less polarized than in Spain. But those on March 10 will be tough and will require coalition governments, either on the right or the left. Will the two largest parties in power since the consolidation of democracy be reduced to rubble by the most radical forces of the left and especially the right? I do not believe that. But the panorama seems very contradictory.
Antonio Costa Pinto He is a professor of political science at the University of Lisbon
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