In 2016, Portugal’s president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, issued a lighthearted rebuke to his prime minister: António Costa, the president noted, was prone to “a chronic and slightly irritating optimism”.
Almost six years on, Costa’s optimism appears fairly well founded. On Sunday night the 60-year-old leader of Portugal’s Socialist party (PS) defied the polls, as well as political trends elsewhere in Europe, to secure a surprise outright majority in a snap general election.
The PS had won an absolute majority only once before, and there have now been just four such majorities achieved by any party in the past 35 years.
Expectations are likely to be high as the Socialists prepare to return to office to administer €45bn of EU Covid recovery funds. Costa, who has been prime minister since 2015, has been praised for overseeing an economic turnaround, reversing bitterly unpopular austerity measures and managing one of the most successful vaccination programmes in Europe.
He has also shown himself able to navigate tricky political waters. Few imagined that his geringonça (improvised solution) with the Socialists’ erstwhile allies in the Portuguese Communist party and the Left Bloc would last a year, let alone six.
Costa’s absolute majority now frees him from having to rely on the Communists and the Left Bloc, whose opposition to the 2022 budget triggered the early election. Parts of the leftwing electorate appear to have voted strategically, backing the Socialists as they had the best chance of winning and punishing the smaller parties they blame for bringing the last legislature to a premature end.
The centre-right Social Democrats (PSD), who finished second, were ahead in some polls last week but may have been scorned by centrists voters who were uncomfortable at the prospect of a PSD minority government having to strike deals with the far-right Chega party.
The Socialists have said they could increase the minimum wage in western Europe’s poorest country from €705 (£582) a month to €900 by 2026, and plan to spend most of the EU funds on updating Portugal’s infrastructure. The PSD, meanwhile, had promised to cut taxes on corporate profits and personal income.
If the polls were wide of the mark when it came to the winners – the consensus was that it would be a close race between the Socialists and the PSD, with neither winning an outright majority – they were not wrong on Chega. And if Sunday was a monumental night for Costa and his party, it was also one for the former football pundit André Ventura and his far-right grouping.
Chega won 12 seats, up from just one in the 2019 election, to become the third-largest party in the 230-seat parliament. Its share of the vote rose from 1.9% three years ago to 7.2%, meaning that more and more Portuguese voters are heeding Ventura’s populist, anti-Roma discourse.
Chega’s rise echoes the arrival of the far-right Vox party in Spain’s parliament three years ago. Spain and Portugal – long fondly imagined to be immune to the far right because of their relatively recent experiences of the Franco and Salazar dictatorships – have each now proved themselves insufficiently vaccinated.
Among those offering their congratulations to Ventura were Vox’s leader, Santiago Abascal, and Marine Le Pen. The latter hailed Chega’s victory as further proof that “throughout Europe, people are rising up to reclaim their freedom and their sovereignty”.
Costa, whose natural optimism has now been buoyed by an unexpected electoral triumph, has acknowledged the scale of his new mandate and promised not to abuse it as he seeks to bring together a fragmented country and help lead its social and economic recovery from the pandemic.
“An absolute majority doesn’t mean absolute power; it doesn’t mean governing alone,” he said on Sunday night. “It’s an increased responsibility and it means governing with and for all Portuguese.”
