On peculiarities of Portuguese elections

Right centrists with the incumbent Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho won in the parliamentary elections in Portugal. The bloc “Portugal Ahead” gained nearly 37 percent of votes, winning 99 out of 230  seats in the parliament. The second place is occupied by Socialists with 32 percent – they have 85 seats. The elections were successful for the radical Left Bloc, headed by Catarina Martins. It won over 10 percent of votes, twice as much as during the previous elections. The communist bloc has got into the parliament too. Over eight percent of the voters have voted for three parties, including The Greens. So, the far-left bloc will have 19 MPs. The united democratic coalition, including the Communists and the Green Party, will have 17 seats.

Coelho has already announced the formation of the new government. However, the result of the right-wing centrists is worse compared to the previous elections four years ago, when they won 50 percent of votes. Coelho admitted that his bloc hasn’t won absolute majority, so it has to create a coalition with some other party, except for the allies in the bloc, CDS – People’s Party, headed by Paulo Portas.

“Based on the result we received during this election, I have agreed with Mr. Portas to convene the nationwide bodies of our parties as soon as possible and formalize the agreement on creation of a government, which lied in the groundwork of our coalition,” Coelho said.

Although “Portugal Ahead” lacks 17 seats to form the majority alone, the victory in the bloc was assessed as the population’s disapproval of the austerity policy. “For the first time in the history governmental coalition managed not only to fulfill its mandate, but to stay for the second term,” Paulo Portas, the leader of the People’s Party, which is part of the governmental bloc, said.

The opposition Socialists congratulated their rivals on the victory. Their leader Antonio Costa stated that he is not going to unite with other left-wing forces to create a majority. “The coalition must understand that Portugal is going through a new political impulse. They cannot rule like they used to, pretending that nothing has happened,” he said.

For Socialists, headed by Lisbon mayor Antonio Costa, the second place with 32 percent of votes is almost a defeat. However, if they unite with other left-wing forces, in particular, the Communists, the Socialists also stand the chance to create a coalition. Although Costa, who had expected better results, admitted the defeat at a press conference, he emphasized that he is not going to resign from the position of the party’s leader, in spite of the demands of some of his fellow party members.

Although the Portuguese voters did not give a clear mandate for governing to the right-wing centrists, it looks like far-left parties in Portugal do not enjoy mass popularity, unlike in Greece and Spain.

“The challenge starts now,” daily newspaper Diario de Noticias commented on the results of the elections in the editorial column on Monday. Publico noted that the voting “has left the country in a dead end.”

In the following several days the president of Portugal will ask the party that has earned the highest number of votes to form the government. The head of the state may ask the left-center parties to take the power, because together they have more seats than the incumbent government.

However, there is a political abyss between the Socialists and other parties. The left-wing bloc, which has won 19 seats, wants to negotiate the national debt and demands better conditions for paying the loans to creditors and putting an end to the austerity measures, increasing the corporate tax. And the Communist party, which has won 17 seats, supports Portugal’s exit from the eurozone.

Most importantly, the Socialists’ leader Antonio Costa stated during the election campaign that his party will become part of the great coalition “when aliens land on the Earth.”

According to reviewers, the new political climate will face the first major test in several weeks, when the parliament will be discussing the new budget for 2016.

COMMENTARIES

“EARLY RESULTS OF PORTUGUESE ELECTIONS ARE QUITE POSITIVE FOR UKRAINE”

Leonid TRETIAK, charge d’affaires a.i. of Ukraine in the Portuguese Republic, Lisbon:

“It is too early to make final conclusions about the election results in Portugal. If we take into account the fact that most likely the ruling coalition, consisting of Social Democrats and the People’s Party of Portugal, will be the winners, there won’t be any big changes in the new government. Because the leaders of both parties in the coalition are now in power. The seats in the new Cabinet of Ministers will be divided between these parties. And the fact that the Socialists have won over 30 percent of votes, which will give them many seats in parliament, lets us hope that they will take a greater part in governing the country in the future.

“If current situation remains, this will be a great positive result for Ukraine, because Portugal has been and remains a stable consistent lobbyist of Ukraine’s interests in the world and in the European structures. It has always been on Ukraine’s side, supporting the statements and documents in favor of Ukraine approved in the EU, including the parliamentary organizations. Therefore, I think that in this light the early results of the elections in Portugal are quite positive for us.

“What prevented the Socialists from winning, in spite of the polls? The fact that they started to pay too much attention to the topics about the future development of Portugal, which ran counter to the population’s opinion. In particular, they paid a lot of attention to such notions as the national awareness, going as far as leaving the eurozone and returning to the national currency, in other words, decentralization slogans close to anti-globalist ones.

“The situation after the crisis has shown to the Portuguese that the only thing the country may count on is the financial help from the EU institutions. Therefore, the stand taken by the Socialists ran counter to the vision of the Portuguese population of their positive future in terms of economy. Moreover, the leadership of the Socialists showed signs of split. General Secretary Costa at the beginning of the race positioned himself practically as the new prime minister and even brought forth his program, and at the end he was even considering the possibility of running for president, and his number-three on the list Maria De Belem noted that she was going to run for president too.

“As for the results of the Left Bloc, it won’t have much effect on the Portuguese policy.”

“THE GROWTH OF LEFTIST MOODS WON’T BE AS CATASTROPHIC AS IT WAS IN GREECE”

Serhii SOLODKY, first deputy director of  the Institute of World Policy, Kyiv:

“The Portuguese voters are making mistakes, but they are not as critical as the mistakes of the Greek electorate. The Portuguese are tired of the austerity measures, the unemployment, the high level of poverty; hundreds of thousands of the Portuguese are fleeing the country. All this creates a favorable ground for various populists, especially the left-wing politicians. However, the increase of leftist moods in Portugal is after all not as catastrophic as, for example, in Greece. The voters are more scrupulous; maybe this year’s Greek experience with the victory of Left populist Syriza taught them something. Such trends bear indirect risks for Ukraine as well. For example, Portuguese Communist party explicitly accuses the Ukrainian power (putschists) of flirting with fascism and persecuting the ‘democratic’ Communists. At the same time Portuguese left-wing politicians bring their own historical experience to substantiate the invented accusations: ‘The Communist Party of Portugal considers that such actions of Ukrainian parliament deserve to be condemned by the government of Portugal, the country which has suffered from fascist dictatorship for 48 years.’ The mere existence of such moods proves that there is a need for more intensive work of Ukrainian politicians, scholars, journalists, and even average Ukrainians in the large Portuguese Diaspora, to shatter the propagandist nonsense of the ‘Russian world.’ Portuguese politicians in private talk admit: they don’t support us actively not because they don’t believe in our rightness; the problem is that many Portuguese know little about the Russian aggression, because it is too far from Portugal. However, the current crisis connected with the refugees from Syria proves that the distance is a relative notion in the globalized world. And the threats presented by militarist Russia can have much more catastrophic consequences than the security challenges of Near East.”