Will the third election in three years bring stable government, or more of the same?
Sunday’s legislative elections have been described as the elections ‘no one wants’. But this was never an accurate description: political leaders have wanted this campaign for months – not for the good of the country (which was moving along perfectly satisfactorily before the government fell), but for what it might bring in the way of power to their particular parties.
PSD, the political group leading the AD coalition with CDS-PP, has been hugely frustrated by its lack of majority in the last complicated 11 months of government. The constant PSD lament to parliament has been “let us work” – as opposition parties joined forces to thwart policy proposals.
In the end, a crisis ‘came from nowhere’, in the words of President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa – a suspicion that the prime minister has conflicts of interest, due to his business past, unbefitting of a political leader; and instead of bending over backwards trying to assuage the clamouring hoards (of the political opposition), PM Luís Montenegro turned the situation around, and said the equivalent of ‘let the people decide’.
It is a massive risk.
PS opponent Pedro Nuno Santos is also facing a cliffhanger: if his party does not win the majority he keeps telling the country it will win on Sunday, his own political future will be compromised. He has always been known for being ‘hot headed’.
It was he who issued a government dispatch about the location of a new Lisbon airport without getting the go-ahead from his superior, the prime minister of the time – leading to the dispatch being unceremoniously cancelled (and to him almost losing his job as minister of infrastructure).
And it was Pedro Nuno Santos who ‘okayed’ an illegal golden handshake of half a million euros over WhatsApp, and then forgot that he had done it at all … In other words, Pedro Nuno Santos has a checkered political past, and unless he can bring a rabbit out of the hat on Sunday, he may well have to go back to working for his comfortably successful father (whose businesses do a lot of work with the state).
CHEGA’s André Ventura, meantime, has been telling the campaign trail that the polls predicting very much the same as before (a minority Social Democrat government) are, in fact, all wrong: “CHEGA will be winning on Sunday, and putting the country to rights.”
The fact that CHEGA MPs and councillors have been caught in some truly dismal situations (including pilfering people’s suitcases from airport carousels and selling the contents online, paying for oral sex from a minor via a gay dating app, and pursuing political opponents with a gun) have been dismissed by Ventura as ‘the hazards of the political every day’.
At least he dealt with these issues promptly, he tells anyone who challenges him – suggesting PSD and PS solutions would be to protect their miscreants and keep them within the party.
And this is roughly the essence of the current campaign. It has been a series of one-upmanship and insults, with the main contenders going out of their way (seemingly) to create a photo-opportunity: the PM recently has been playing volleyball on the beach; he has been running in races; swimming in the sea. Pedro Nuno Santos has been striding through the streets of Guarda dressed in a dramatic traditional coat with a fur collar, and shortly after, donning leathers and leaping onto a Ducati motorcycle. André Ventura has been kissing babies, and yes, he too managed a ride on a motorbike, but as a pillion passenger.
The smaller parties have been less theatrical, but most of them ‘on the attack of the right’, warning of the folly of voting for either PSD, CDS-PP – and even for Iniciativa Liberal (the country’s fourth political force, and likely to remain that way), which has intimated that it might be willing to support a PSD/CDS-PP coalition if the need after Sunday’s results arises.
The reality is that, after days and days of political caravans invading chosen corners of the nation and making a great deal of noise, the message to the people remains garbled beyond ‘vote for us’.
It is not clear what PS Socialists would do differently to transform ‘health, education, housing’ – bearing in mind that the AD coalition inherited the mess it has been trying to deal with following eight years of Socialism (and decades of Socialism since Portugal became a democracy).
As for immigration, parties have been tiptoeing around the subject – perhaps aware that this does weigh on people’s minds, and that they could alienate potential voters by saying anything definitive.
AD played a blinder just before the campaign began, announcing that thousands of illegal immigrants would be asked to leave the country within 20 days, or face expulsion. The party was criticised for stealing CHEGA’s thunder (CHEGA being traditionally against immigration), but the criticism was fleeting.
PS Socialists have been markedly quiet about immigrants throughout this election: it was their party whose ‘manifestation of interest’ mechanism snarled up the works of immigration services as hundreds of thousands of people from the Indian subcontinent arrived here on tourist visas and then filed for residency.
Suffice it to say, the prediction that immigration would play a central part in this election was also wrong. The only real takeaway is that all parties are seeking advancement: PCP communists being the most honest in this regard. Leader Paulo Raimundo has said he wants to see the party return to having six MPs, instead of the four it mustered in the elections last year, while PAN has said it would like to see a parliamentary bloc, instead of just the one MP it has who always talks as if she has been running for a bus, but sadly did not catch it.
The polls, meantime, have been consistently boring: telling us all that very little is set to change. Portugal is spending a lot of time, money and energy on these elections, but we may all wake up on Monday with the same faces, saying the same things, in the same order.
What does seem clear, however, is that people are more ‘confident’ that Luís Montenegro is a good prime minister than they are that Pedro Nuno Santos could be any better (according to an Intercampus survey conducted for Correio da Manhã, CMTV and Jornal de Negócios).
We just have to wait and see – and hope that the future is not as confused by political manipulation as the recent past has been. New elections cannot be called before next summer, due to constitutional rules (as President Marcelo will be leaving after 10 years in office in the new year, and his successor cannot dissolve parliament for six months after being elected).
COMMENT By NATASHA DONN
natasha.donn@portugalresident.com
