PORTUGAL: Socialist Triumph – a Shift in Style, not Substance

By Mario Dujisin Reprint | | Print |

Mario Dujisin

LISBON, Oct 2 1995 (IPS) - The Socialist Party’s (PS) triumph in Portugal’s legislative elections on Sunday is expected to bring a change in governing style, without any major shift in the present route towards integration with a Europe that increasingly pays homage to the free market.

PS leader Antonio Guterres’ victory speech gives a clear indication of this, and political commentators from the entire spectrum predict the same.

Never before in this country of 10 million inhabitants, with 4.5 million citizens living abroad, had Italian writer Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa been paraphrased so often: “let’s change everything so everything remains the same.”

The surprise brought by the socialist triumph was “the severe verdict passed on the Social Democratic administration’s performance over the last four years, especially the executive branch’s leadership style,” stated Mario de Bettencourt Resendes, the director of the influential daily ‘Diario de Noticias’.

Preliminary results point to the best election in the history of the PS, which garnered 43.9 percent of the votes, and won 109 of a total of 230 seats in parliament, 14.6 percent more than in 1991.

On the other hand, the elections meant the worst defeat yet suffered by the Social Democratic Party (PSD) – that leans toward the liberal centre-right despite its name, and which has governed Portugal with that orientation for the last 10 years. The PSD took a mere 34 percent of the vote, compared to 50.4 in 1991.

The ultranationalist Right, represented by the Popular Party (PP), was the other big winner in Sunday’s elections, doubling its vote from 4.4 to 9 percent, while the communists’ share remained steady at 8.7 percent.

Meanwhile, voters dealt a harsh blow to the range of tiny minority parties, which took from 0.7 percent of the vote – the Revolutionary Movement of the Proletariat Party – to 0.04 percent – the separatist Partido do Atlantico of the Azores archipelago.

In order to govern without an absolute majority, the socialists will at least need an initial lack of hostility from the opposition, in order to get President Mario Soares to name Guterres as prime minister.

While a tallying of Sunday’s votes indicates that the left holds a majority in Portugal for the first time in 15 years, such a conclusion is merely a mathematical exercise, because the PS has never accepted the possibility of an alliance with the Communist Party (PCP).

Likewise, it is improbable that the PSD, a member of the Liberal International, will decide to join forces with the right- wing PP – which was rejected as too radical by the conservatives in the European Parliament.

Judging from Guterres’ speech, the key could lie in PCP support in aspects that differentiate the PS from the outgoing administration – in education and health – and from the PSD in terms of the reinforcing of Portugal’s integration in the European Union (EU).

Preparing the terrain, Guterres has already announced that his government “will be sensitive to dialogue with the opposition,” and will aim for “a new democratic culture, because holding a majority does not necessarily mean being right.”

At least within his party, Guterres – a 46-year-old electronic engineer – has demonstrated his ability to hold bickering factions together, in the face of in-fighting that broke out when Soares left the party leadership in 1985.

From 1985 to 1992, when Guterres rose to the head of the party, the PS had three general secretaries, and was plagued by major differences regarding policy towards Angola, where an influential sector of the PS headed by the president’s son, Joao Soares, supported rebel leader Jonas Savimbi.

After a major effort by Guterres – who has won the support of influential independent intellectuals – within the party, a newly united PS rose to the occasion on Sunday, winning the elections by a comfortable margin.