Portugal sprints to the right in recent elections

BIG POST about Portugal's elections on sunday. I wrote about the exit polls here but full results were even worse.

So the incumbent center-right PSD which called elections on itself to avoid further questions into the PM's private business ventures (which I wrote about here and here) won the election with 32% (+3% than last time), key takeaways are that people REALLY didn't want to have elections 3 years in a row and also that no one cares that the PM's family business gets money from companies that also deal with the state.

Shockingly the center-left PS which had been in power for 9 years prior to 2024 basically tied for second place with the far-right CH, they both got 58 MPs and there are still 4 MPs to hand out, those belonging to the Europe and Out-of-Europe electoral districts, last years CH elected 1 MP from each of those districts while the PS only elected 1 from the Europe district, so it's not inconceivable that the PS will be knocked down to 3rd place.

This is unprecedented and the effects are still reverberating, the PS party leader, who's strategy was rhetorically moving to the center while being perceived by most people as being from the left-wing of the party, already resigned and the main question surrounding the party now is if the new leader will give full support to the PSD government to avoid it having to seel support from the far right or if it will be in full opposition.

Looking at the electoral map it's easy to see what happened, while the PSD dominated the north of the country (which has always voted right wing), the PS was eaten apart in the center, south and interior by the CH. The CH also solidified itself into regions were the communist party used to be electorally strong. Key takeaway, it doesn't matter if CH is riddled with criminals and scandals (here and here), anti-immigration and anti-migrant discourse has become VERY powerful in this country, so much that even the PSD and PS took it up in this election, with southeast asian and romani people being the key targets.

On the left the results are also sobering, the europhile pro-war greens were the only party to grow, they increased by 1%, now becoming the largest to the left of the PS, the less said about these people the better, they are a plague on the european left, I wrote about the link above about the exit polls. Really it's surprising that portugal lasted this long without, or rather that the PS could contain inside itself for this long, a europhile-green party in a country with such huge pro-eu sentiment.

The communists did not manage to increase their vote share like people expected, in fact we lost 0.3% and around 20k votes (a lot of them due to people passing away most likely), which is less than what we lost last time, and this was despite running what was seen by pretty much everyone to be a better campaign than usual (what that really means is that the party leader did well in the interview/debate circuit). Nevertheless it wasn't going to be easy to grow anyways and these are still tough times to be a communist publicly in the political sense, let's hope that next time the factors that make it hard for people to vote for us aren't as relevant, that is the ukraine war, overwhelmingly pro-eu sentiment among the population, racism (which shuts off people's brains to proposals which materially benefit them) and the fact that it's just not popular nowadays to identify yourself as a communist (this probably won't change). But the results of the post-trot demsoc BE show it could've gone way worse for the communists.

A big upset , and usually I would be celebrating this but not this time, is that the BE, which came into the scene in 2000 to dislodge the communist's dominance over left politics and in 2019 was the 3rd most voted party, only got 2% and only elected the party leader as an MP....wow. And it's very easy to see why, it's not that young left-wing (sorta), socially liberal, eco-minded people aren't voting anymore, the problem is that...those people REALLY fucking love the EU and probably felt trapped voting for a party that, unlike the pro-war greens, doesn't wave around the EU flag in meetings, that has always been an anti-capitalist eurosceptic party and that says it only supports arming ukraine if it doesn't "become a war business" (wat? the communists just outright oppose arms shipments btw).

I don't know what they're gonna do now, there are a loft of big names and activists affiliated with the party, and in the hard left of the party the animosity towards the communist party over stuff that you'd expect from trotskyites means that they likely won't want to enter the communist party's coalition, but also the soft left of the party now knows that the greens are more viable electorally, it's a fucked situation but a funny reversal that after years of discourse around the death of the communist party it's the BE that's on life support.

Nauseatingly, the leader of the far-right congratulated himself by saying that he "surpassed the party of Mario Soares (founder of the PS), killed the party of Alvaro Cunhal (historic leader of the communist party) and swept the BE off the map", that second claim isn't true but the other two....damn.

If I had to blame 1 single thing though is that the private news channels, where most people get their politics from, are completely dominated by right wing pundits, and much like Trump is beloved by media networks for drawing eyes to them, the mainstream media here ADORES Andre Ventura the leader of far-right, during the drama around his apparent health scare in the campaign trail (here the networks had fucking camera people stationed outside the hospital for hours waiting for the guy to get out, and everytime a CH guy farts they bring in pundits FROM THE PARTY to commentate on themselves. On one occasion one pundit was explaining how the rise of the far-right could be explained by the amount of media attention they're given only to be interrupted by the anchor who had to cut to the hospital cameras because there were supposed to be updates only for it to turn out that there were no updates and cut back to the pundit to keep making his point

The right now has a 2/3 majority to alter the constitution and if they can sort themselves out will probably remove the "towards a socialist society" from the preamble of the constitution which means portugal will no longer be an AES country 😦 (sorry Richard Wolff). That's the very least, and the preamble is only simbolic anyway, further constitutional reforms about the welfare state are far more dangerous.

Next are the local elections in september-october, these results don't bode well for the communists who are usually the 3rd largest force in local elections, in 2021 we got 8%, especially in the south and interior where CH, who got 4%, just got a huge boost, but it's not clear what that entails since plenty of people vote for the communists in local elections but not in the legislative elections.

And in 2026 are presidential elections where the country is likely to elect a navy guy to be president (which I talked about here)

Among leftists online I'm seeing plenty of hotheaded takes and a lot of hyperbole that could be premature (or could be presciently on point) so it's probably going to take some time for people to settle down and have a clear view of what these results actually mean. Nevertheless that's not a reason to stop fighting and it's not good to feel down for too long, the struggle continues.

2 comments

does anyone of them have particularly daring position vs the only nazis in the middle east?
also, what's up with prices on homes in portugal?
p.s. why on earth would they
The Portuguese Communist Party and the Left Bloc were central actors between 2015 and 2023, providing parliamentary support to Costa’s Socialist governments.
every fucking time ally to center left, do jack shit with your radicalism/can't criticize your peers -> eat shit
from https://jacobin.com/2025/05/portugal-election-chega-far-right
- does anyone of them have particularly daring position vs the only nazis in the middle east?
  The BE and PCP have always supported palestine, the largest pro-palestine protests here are lead by the trade union affiliated with the communist party and there's always palestinian representation in the party's anual "Avante Festival" and debates around palestine. The new rising euro-green party says it supports palestine but then its leader goes to "bring them home" israeli ambassador events, the PS says it supports palestine but had 10 years in power to recognize it but didn't and isn't offering any support to spain's positions on the issue. The right is what you'd expect.
  also, what's up with prices on homes in portugal?
  A lot of speculation, nationals and foreigners putting money in housing because it's a rising asset, historically low public housing stock and EU rules against state interfering in the sector, which has to be kept private, that portugal's incredibly europhilic political class is not willing to challenge.
  ally to center left
  This was the dubbed Contraption government, where in 2015 to drive the austere right out of power, who was going even further than the troika in their reforms, the far-left basically agreed on paper to allow the PS to govern provided it met certain goals and rolled back some reforms. How it worked was the parties never actually joined the government, unlike spain where you had podemos/sumar ministers, they could still criticize and do plenty of opposition stuff (and they almost brough down the government at some points when the center-right would say it would support a leftist measure, like increasing teacher salaries, then it would back off when the PM said he would resign if that happened) and the PCP still supported strikes, but every year during government budget negotiations the left would seek and usually get a some concessions from the PS. The parties' programs didn't actually change they were still anti-nato anti-eu parties, really the PS probably lost some standings in euro circles for being propped up by an "assadist, pro-putin, pro-china, pro-dprk" communist party.
  The result was that people's lives did get better during this time and it was a popular government, so SOMEONE was going to get political benefits from it. In 2019 the PS and BE did, the PCP not so much so it didn't enter into any written agreements that time and reserved itself the option to pull out if it so wished.
  Well in late 2021 when the national health service needed a lot more funding and when the communists were seeking to rollback troika legislation around unions, the BE and PCP respectively made that issue their sticking point during negotiations, the PS did not cede and so the left pulled out and we had elections where the parties were punished FOR BEING SEEN AS bringing down the government and so the PS got an absolute majority. Then it governed by itself poorly and lost in 2024. So it was possible to derive electoral benefits from the situation but the PS's far larger media apparatus convinced people that they were not at fault for being intransigent with the left.
  The situation we're in now is also because the contraption didn't go far enough in some aspects, like housing, because it was a PS government at the end of the day, but one could also argue that it normalized the far-left parties so it was "Ok" to be a BE voter and "uuuuuh kind of ok I guess" to be a communist for a while, that's not the case now especially after the PCP's anti-nato stance on ukraine.
  Nevertheless, most people who vote for these parties by now understand that it's the only way for them to influence government and get some of what they want, even if the parties themselves have stated they don't want to necesserily repeat the experiment, in fact the euro-greens are so popular among former BE voters because they straight up say they want to repeat all of that, and you can bet they'll be less demanding from the PS too.
  I think it's debatable wether the decline of the left is uniquely due to its support for said government (and the BE and PCP, mostly the PCP, antagonized the PS plenty the past few years) or the broader structural trends I mentioned in the post