The Atlantic took over the closing of the campaign in Lisbon yesterday to remind Portugal of its status as a pioneer of globalization, almost five centuries before the existence of that concept, when this small Iberian country of difficult and improbable independence built its legend of explorer and settler of worlds. The wind and rain that entered through the Tagus with the appearance of sabotaging the agenda of events carried a vindication of a past that was hardly compatible with a country closed to foreigners and that discriminated against those who were different.
While in political Lisbon the cabals and the design of conspiratorial strategies did not stop in the face of the eventual complicated scenarios that will emerge from the polls tomorrow, to strengthen the cordon sanitaire against the extreme right that has emerged in the campaign or to tear it down, the ocean sent a clear message to the Portuguese who wanted to hear it: that of the enormous contradiction between the Portuguese national essence, that of the country that did not go further because there was no other world, and the program of the (apparently) most powerful force. patriot, Chega, the extreme right of the racist and xenophobic André Ventura.
“I want to trust the word of Luís Montenegro (the conservative candidate) that he will not reach an agreement with Chega if the Socialist Party (PS) comes first and can only come to power by agreeing with Ventura,” he confessed yesterday afternoon in the arcades of the Terreio do Paço – the Portuguese Gate of the Sun, the symbol of central power – Maria Augusta, a young 21-year-old law student, a member of the PS who had just attended the parade and speech, next to the imposing arch of Rua Augusta , of the candidate of his party, of the former minister and socialist candidate Pedro Nuno Santos. Maria was referring to Montenegro’s repeated campaign promises not to deal with Chega, despite pressure from a significant part of her party, starting with her former boss and former prime minister, Pedro Passos Coelho, who now appears as the supporter. of the extreme right. She maintains, like Ventura himself, that the highest priority lies in ending the eight-odd year cycle of socialist governments.
Despite the very clear progressive hegemony that has existed in Portugal since 2015, after the rigors of the international rescue and the at times almost colonial tutelage of the troika, discouragement is spreading in the ranks of the center-left. There is little hope for a possible reissue of the geringonça, as the unprecedented coalition of the PS with the forces to its left, the Bloc and the PCP, is known, which the now resigned socialist prime minister António Costa pulled out of his then prodigious hat. . This demoralization is perceived in the construction of the scenario that is beginning to be known as tripolar Portugal. In front of the bipolar of the two blocks, created by Costa precisely, the one on the center-left and the one on the right, in the tripolar there is a walled-off path, the one on the extreme right.
Thus, socialist aspirations involve coming first and allowing conservative Montenegro to let them govern. Even candidate Santos has come to the conclusion that if the PS and its leftist allies surpass the sum of conservatives and liberals, with the extreme right on the sidelines, there could be a progressive government. If the first scenario is already complicated, even though it has the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, of the conservative faction against the ultras, in favor, the second borders on the chimera.
Even with the tremendous discredit of the polls in Portugal, which have been chaining ridiculous things for five years, in the end they end up setting the agenda and drawing the scenarios, like an inexcusable ritual, amplified by the media. The serious, worried faces of the two major parties, the conservative and the socialist, more so in the second than in the first, and the euphoric position of the extreme right end up reflecting surveys against which politicians rant and of which people laugh in the street. Yes, there is a point of distrust, because it is not difficult to find those who believe in an increasingly less probable result in the demoscopy, that of the first socialists, as should be logical if the extreme right grows as much as is said, well It cuts space for conservatives. But these are variations on forecasts that are in question.
“Everything is going to be very rushed, but we are going to win,” a retiree who proudly wore the PSD cockade on his chest said yesterday at noon in the Alvalade neighborhood, after an event in Montenegro. If Montenegro comes first and there is a right-wing majority, he will have a clear path, since Santos has agreed to let him govern. It is the easy part of the cordon sanitaire to the extreme right. The difficult part is in that hypothetical first socialist place in a Portugal turned to the right. That would be the great test bed of whether the extreme right can be stopped at the edge of Europe, in Lisbon, which was several times the door to the universe.
