Portugal will have early elections for the Parliament on January 30, 2022. The announcement was made by the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, in an address to the country this Thursday (4).
In his speech, the head of state officially informed the Portuguese of his decision to dissolve the Assembly of the Republic. The action was a consequence of the disapproval of the 2022 Budget proposal presented by Prime Minister António Costa, of the Socialist Party.
Legends such as the Portuguese Communist Party and the Left Block, which made the government viable in recent years, announced in advance that they would reject the text.
“For the first time in 45 years of the Assembly of the Republic, a State Budget was not approved. The rejection did not occur at any moment, with any budget”, said Rebelo de Sousa, to whom the differences between the parties, which led to to the project’s failure, they were substantial and insurmountable.
“This is the turning point around the world for a lasting exit from the biggest pandemic in the last hundred years and the economic and social crisis it has provoked.”
In addition to the political debate, the next legislature will also have as a backdrop the debate on the application of the approximately 15 billion euros that Portugal will receive from the recovery and resilience fund offered by the European Union – which aims to accelerate the post economic recovery. -pandemic.
The dissolution of Parliament, however, took place without the resignation of the government. With that, the prime minister and the other ministers continue practically with full functions, although limited by the absence of regular legislative activity.
Even though it has already been officially announced, the end of the composition of the Assembly as it is today will only take place after the publication of the presidential decree in the Diário de República, which is scheduled to take place at the end of this month. This is the eighth time that the country has gone through the dissolution of Parliament.
Since Portuguese law stipulates that elections must be held between 55 and 60 days after the decree, the long delay until publication of the decision is a mechanism to allow the election to be held only at the end of January, as announced by the president .
The rejection of the Budget and the call for early elections gave rise to a series of discussions about the role played by the president in recent weeks, as well as political turmoil on the right and left.
Portuguese analysts and politicians have pointed out Rebelo de Sousa’s fingerprints at the impasse. An extremely popular figure in the country and normally spared from harsher public criticism, the president was not immune from the crisis.
Even before the formal presentation of the budget proposal to deputies, he had already publicly warned the parties: failure to approve the plan would mean the dissolution of Parliament. This attitude, according to Francisco Pereira Coutinho, a professor at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, was one of the origins of the problem.
“The power of dissolution is discretionary. The president decided to say this in order to condition the debate on the Budget, to force parties on the left to reach an understanding,” he says.
According to the expert, it may seem strange to see such a large presidential intervention in a parliamentary model, but the leading role of Rebelo de Sousa is due to the fact that he was recently re-elected, in January of this year, with very large popular support — he won in the first round with 60.7% of the votes.
“And he is in a second term. Portuguese presidents at this stage, as they cannot be reelected a third time, usually have a much greater political intervention.”
Professor at the Institute of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Paula Espírito Santo believes that Rebelo de Sousa tried to make a warning so that the parties could understand each other when presenting the option of dissolving the Assembly of the Republic.
“At that point, he hoped that the parties would have some awareness of what was involved if the Budget was not passed. It was not said in the sense that he wanted that solution.”
The disapproval of the Budget project marked the end of an unprecedented alliance between the historically fragmented Portuguese left, which made possible the arrival of António Costa to power in November 2015.
Pejoratively dubbed the “gimmick”, due to its apparent fragility, the post-electoral arrangement formed by the Socialist Party, the Left Bloc and the CDU (coalition of communists and the Ecologist Party Os Verdes) withstood the four years of the legislature without major upheavals. .
In the next election, in 2019, the Socialist Party, even without having obtained an absolute majority —there were 108 seats among the 230 in the Assembly—, chose not to repeat a written agreement with the other leftist parties, negotiating individually in each vote. Thus, in the last two Budgets, the government had already struggled to reach approval.
In Portuguese news today, however, it is the crisis among political parties on the right that has drawn attention.
The biggest opposition party, the PSD (Social Democratic Party), and the traditional center-right CDS-PP are currently facing fierce disputes for the leadership. The announcement of the dissolution of Parliament came when both acronyms already had regular internal elections scheduled. The CDS would choose the new leadership in November, and the PSD in December.
Claiming that there is a need to focus on the national dispute, current party leaders are trying to postpone internal elections – which could remove them from office and, perhaps, from Parliament – until after the new election date. While the elections in the CDS have already been postponed, the dispute in the PSD is still scheduled for the beginning of December.
Deputy Rui Rio, former mayor of Porto, disputes control of the party with Paulo Rangel, currently European deputy, and Nuno Miguel Henriques, former candidate for the City Council of Alenquer, in greater Lisbon.
In Espírito Santo’s assessment, the current electoral scenario is still full of uncertainties, without a clear definition of how the different political forces will be affected in the next election
Based on the last municipal elections and on recent polling intentions, the political scientist estimates that the chances of growth appear above all for the smaller parties, such as Chega, of the ultra-right, and the Liberal Initiative.
Coutinho, from Universidade Nova de Lisboa, also believes that there will be a great growth of the more radical right, which currently has only one seat in the Assembly. “Everything indicates, outside the Lisbon bubble, that we are going to have a very strong parliamentary representation of this right, which I even find it difficult to qualify. The result could be the country’s ungovernability,” he says.
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