Beleaguered leftwing politicians across Europe will doubtlessly be looking at last weekend’s general elections in Portugal and taking notes. In a surprise outcome, the centre-left Socialist party (PS) won a historic absolute majority, taking 117 of the 230 seats in parliament. Despite polls on the eve of the election suggesting that there would be a possible tie, the centre-right opposition party, the PSD, was routed. The political map in Portugal is now painted almost entirely red.
Portugal is something of a European outlier. Its economic recovery from the crises of the early 2010s was praised worldwide, with growth at one point exceeding the eurozone average. While most countries in Europe struggled to keep their coronavirus infections under control, it was becoming a world leader in terms of vaccinations – almost 90% of the population is double-jabbed. And, unlike other countries that elected leftwing governments in 2015, Portugal has enjoyed political stability, with the Socialists at the helm ever since.
So what did last weekend’s results tell us? On the right, there has been a splintering of affiliations between the weakened veteran PSD; the far-right Chega (meaning: Enough); and the freshly minted, pro-business Liberal Initiative (IL). For the first time in Portugal’s modern democratic history, the rightwing Christian Democrats, once the third largest party in parliament, did not return a single MP. On the left the house won big, with António Costa, the prime minister, cannibalising much of the usually more radical electorate, leaving only morsels for the likes of the Communist party and the anticapitalist Left Bloc.
One lesson from these results is that the painful austerity years after the 2008 banking crisis have not been forgotten. For the centre-right PSD, in government at the time, this is still a cross to bear. Its attempt to tactically appeal to the left at times did not work. Portugal is a country where the left still has strong roots in ordinary people’s lives, where trade unions rally behind the Communist party and millennials rally behind eco-socialist forces, meaning “working-class conservatism” doesn’t have much traction.
For social democrats and soft socialists such as Costa, this was a particularly sweet victory, given the circumstances. The PS had been in power since 2015, but it was hampered by the politicking that comes with minority government – depending officially or in practice on an agreement with the far left. So when the Communists and the Left Bloc started grumbling last year over levels of public investment at a time of social crisis, Costa knew this was his chance to go for broke. He could lose it all, but he could also win big and ditch his radical hangers-on. After six years of yearning, the prime minister got his wish.
There may indeed be a lesson there for sister parties across Europe. The Labour party under Keir Starmer, for instance, could learn something from Costa about cooperating with the far left, at least until electoral victory is assured. For the communists and radicals, the election was a harsh learning experience. They discovered that you can cooperate with the centre to gain power, but once there, you need to carve out a distinct identity, which they failed to do – and ended up paying the price.
But the gravest lesson from these elections concerns the creeping success of the far right. The third largest political force in Portugal – a country with a proud antifascist history, where the dictatorship was toppled in a bloodless socialist revolution in 1974 – is now the Chega. It returned one loudmouthed and churlish MP in 2019. When parliament returns in mid-February, it will have a group of 12. That’s a dozen lawmakers representing a party whose leader has repeatedly sought to demonise the Roma minority and whose representatives have been associated with nostalgia for the Salazar dictatorship and have a record of making inflammatory comments relating to race.
It’s an age-old lesson, really. Any oxygen given to the far right is dangerous. The normalisation of a far-right discourse through national television, daily newspapers and by the commentariat, even if for the sake of contradicting talking points, often only serves to lend momentum. In a country that nearly 50 years ago stamped the far right out of power, it is particularly chastening and disturbing to see its modern-day equivalents return to the São Bento palace, where parliament sits. For all the sweet relief that the Socialist party may be feeling, the rise of Chega is a reminder that complacency is never an option.
Joana Ramiro is a freelance journalist based in London and a contributor to the Portuguese news platform Setenta e Quatro.