The right-wing is advancing in Portugal along the path of extremism. Its progression threatens the dominance that the center-left has maintained since the fall of 2015 and makes the conservative candidate LuÃs Montenegro appear as the favorite to replace the resigned socialist prime minister, António Costa, although the options of the socialist cannot be ruled out Pedro Nuno Santos. These are the only certainties in a week of the Lusitanian parliamentary elections, deep in the demoscopic fog, after the repeated serious errors of the polls, and with the doubts about the resistance of the sanitary cordon to ensure that the powerful far-right Chega party, led by André Ventura, does not have the key to power.
This Atlantic fog that surrounds Portuguese politics has much of its origin in the still unclear events of the decisive November 7, which led to Costa’s unexpected resignation after eight years. It was quite a record for the Socialist Party (PS), which had governed for a maximum of six and a half years with the current Secretary General of the UN, António Guterres. Costa resigned after the Prosecutor’s Office announced that it would investigate him for his alleged involvement in a corruption network related to public investments and mining permits. Suspicions were cast into doubt soon after and criticism of the Prosecutor’s Office grew for its checkmate against the prime minister, even though 75,000 euros of unknown origin were found in the office of Costa’s chief of staff.
Without warning, at least a year in advance, Portugal was thrown into the elections with an unprecedented renewal of leadership and with the polls more than discredited. In 2022 they made a fool of themselves, after announcing the possible fall of a Costa who won an absolute majority. Demographic memory tends to be fragile, but in Portugal the disaster is not only recent, but there was another one less than a month ago, in the regional regions of the Azores. Four days earlier, the survey by public television RTP placed the PS three points ahead of the right-wing alliance that won the polls by six.
In this context, it is reckless to take at face value the radical shift to the right that the polls are now announcing, going from 43% of voters in 2022 to 55% in the average polls produced by Rádio Renascença. It is also not very plausible that the centre-left will collapse to 38%, from the 52% to 54% it has maintained since 2015. The certainty, this very Portuguese word, is in the fact that the right-wing is rising and the progressives come down, but it is not known how much, or even which block will prevail.
The same thing happens, to the point of becoming the ultimate mystery, with regard to candidacies. The Democratic Alliance of the conservative Montenegro appears first in the polls, with an average of 2.5 points more than the PS of Santos, an advantage that Expresso, the reference weekly, reduces by one point. In principle, Montenegro and Santos are technically tied. It seems that the conservative coalition retains the same percentage that its components added in 2023, while the PS is announced to have a strong blow, of up to 14 points, although Costa’s precedent of two years ago calls for caution total
At the same time, the rise that is attributed to the extreme right of the former football television talk show host, André Ventura, seems excessive. According to the Renascença average, the Chega would multiply by 2.5, from the discreet 7% two years ago to a considerable 18%.
Trying to interpret the possible errors of the surveys is always a very high-risk exercise, since you are working with a possibly radioactive raw material. Only global trends can be taken into account, because they coincide with the dynamics of the electoral campaign. In the campaign, the right-wing parties are on the offensive, in search of power, trying to maintain a soft left, for whom demoscopic disasters are the greatest consolation. The thematic axes are tilted to starboard, as can be seen in the unprecedented controversy over immigration, which marked the debates between the candidates.
Montenegro’s promise not to get along with the ultras and Santos’ willingness to allow his rival to govern if the democratic right exceeds the sum of the center-left create a sanitary cordon to prevent Ventura from being the master of the situation, but Montenegro shows ambiguous regarding the scenario that could only come to power by allying with the Chega.
The fog on Sunday is not only demoscopic, but also political, with a huge level of indecision and a generally colossal abstention rate.
