The Portuguese vote this Sunday for the third time in three years to decide who will govern the country in uncertain times. Portugal is the second community country that has most frequented the polls in the last decade, only surpassed by Bulgaria. The polls are inclined to the victory of AD, the conservative coalition led by Luís Montenegro, although without slack to do without partners. And this leads to the unknown of whether the sanitary cordon against the ultra -rightist Chega will remain or will be sacrificed to seek a more stable government than the previous one. Montenegro has already shown that he is willing to agree with liberal initiative, fourth parliamentary force, but could be insufficient.
These elections derive from the existence of Spinumviva, a family business that the prime minister kept operational after arriving at office in April 2024. In their domestic economy the companies payments continued. In all this time, no illegality has emerged, but a repeated concealment tactic of data by Montenegro, both to the deputies of Parliament (he came to tell them that he had more things to do than answer his questions) and the entity of transparency, to which he only recently notified the list of all Spinumviva clients. Despite being the electoral trigger, the issue has not been central during the campaign.
In the survey of the Portuguese newspaper Public Published this Friday, 43% of respondents replied that the case of Montenegro’s family business was little or nothing important to decide their vote. More relevant were the debates, the campaign or government management during the blackout. For economist Susana Peralta, this irrelevance is “very serious” for showing “a certain resignation of republican values.” “You can have different ideologies, but we should want to get rid of people with little ethical behaviors. People seem not of Lisbon.
The corruption barometer published by the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation confirms that most of the Portuguese “have a legalistic definition of corruption.” “That can lead to the corruption qualification of a set of legal, but ethically censurable behaviors and Cunha (The plug).
Montenegro has made a comfortable campaign, although it began stumble upon knowing that it had revealed to the transparency entity, at the request of this, the list with seven unknown clients of Spinumviva, among them some with contracts with the State. Sometimes he has been irritated before the press questions for the matter, but the sensation in his ranks is optimism and that they will be reinforced in these elections (34% in the last survey, six points above the results of 2024). “A major majority,” the prime minister claimed in his actions. The conviction that Spinumviva does not burn them is so full that one of its clients, the gas station businessman Joaquim Barros Rodrigues, who paid almost 200,000 euros to the company, went to the rally that the prime minister gave in Braga a few days ago and answered to questions from the press.
50 years ago the Portuguese voted for the first time after a long dictatorship. 91.6% of the population did to choose the Constituent Assembly that drafted the Constitution. A majority of the hunger of democracy that has gone down in history. In the last decade the abstention has never dropped from 40%. Indifference was maximum in 2019, when it exceeded 51%. In the 2024 elections, participation improved in part by the Tirón de Chega, the ultra -right -wing formation led by André Ventura, which attracted many new voters and became the third parliamentary force, with more than one million votes and 50 deputies. The difference between AD and the Socialist Party, led by Pedro Nuno Santos, was then just over 50,000 votes.
The results of the polls will reveal this Sunday if the Hyperpersonalist project of Ventura will become a structural party of the system, which can aspire to govern the country similar to Italy or France or if it begins to deflate. The scandals that surrounded some of their representatives in the last year do not seem to penalize him in the surveys (19% support in the most recent). Despite his health problems, Ventura reappeared in the last act of the match in Lisbon, aware that he is the main asset. Or rather the only asset capable of massively voting the polls. The act ended in cryarsis of crying, the leader and his followers.
No one doubts that the Assembly of the Republic that leaves these elections will have a majority of rights again. The one that has just dissolved had 60% of deputies, added the three formations that cover the entire spectrum from the center -right to the ultra -right (AD, liberal and chega initiative). It has been the third Parliament with the most irrelevance of the left of all democracy, only surpassed by the two mandates of the conservative Aníbal Cavaco Silva, between 1987 and 1995.
This evolution, in the opinion of the political scientist António Costa Pinto, does not respond so much to a conservative turn in the values of the Portuguese society, “but to a new cycle after eight years of socialist governance and a turn to the right of the young vote.” “The protest vote of the less formed people goes to Chega and the most formed, to the liberal initiative. The Socialist Party has an aged electorate and retirees, with fear of which the right cuts the pensions and privatizes the National Health Service,” he explains in a message.
Socialists show a solid electoral base, but also inability to attract new voters, in view of the polls, where they are around 26% (two points less than in 2024). Its main difficulty lies in the connection with young people, also shared with AD. “Young people face problems such as low wages and high prices in housing, which sometimes pushes them to emigrate. That dissatisfaction leads them to reject solutions that they consider exhausted and bet on alternatives to traditional government parties, favoring new ones as a liberal or chega initiative as a form of protest,” explains the professor of Political Science of the University Do Minho, José António Passos.
The phenomenon is not exclusive to the country, nor is the gender gap in electoral preferences, especially accused in Portugal. After Croatia, it is the country of the European Union where there is more difference in the sympathies for ultra -right between boys and girls. According to the study conducted by Javier Carbonell for the European Policy Center, for every woman under 25 who Votes Chega, there are almost five men.
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