Update on government formation

Three European countries have shown some progress on implementing the results of recent elections, while a fourth is headed for an early poll.

Montenegro went to the polls back in June, returning a parliament in which nine different tickets won seats, several of them in turn being coalitions of quite disparate elements. It’s not surprising that putting together a majority government took some time, but it happened eventually: Milojko Spajić, leader of the Europe Now! party, was chosen as prime minister and won a vote of confidence last week, with 46 votes in the 81-seat parliament.

Spajić was always the likely choice, since with 25.5% of the vote his party had the largest contingent in parliament and also had the support of the president, his party colleague Jakov Milatović. In addition to his own centrist pro-European party, his government embraces the conservative pro-Serbian coalition For the Future of Montenegro, the liberal Democratic Montenegro, a small social democratic party and two ethnic Albanian parties.

Another liberal-centrist group, URA (which ran in coalition with Democratic Montenegro), was left out; its relations with Europe Now! are said to be bad, despite (or perhaps because of) their apparent ideological similarity. Apart from that, the government’s complexion is not very different from that of other governments since the fall of the post-Communist Democratic Party of Socialists in 2020. Spajić will be hoping that it can prove more durable.

Spain voted the following month, on 23 July, in an early election chanced by centre-left prime minister Pedro Sánchez. The gamble paid off; although his Socialist party came second in both votes and seats (31.7% and 122 out of 350), it was better placed than its centre-right rival, the People’s Party, to put together a majority coalition.

Sure enough, when People’s Party leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo was given the opportunity to form a government, he was unable to win a vote of confidence, losing 178 to 172. Sánchez was then nominated to make the attempt, with a deadline of 27 November: if no new government is approved by then, parliament must be dissolved for a fresh election.

Now it appears that he has the numbers, following the completion of deals with the two Catalan separatist parties, the left-wing Republican Left of Catalonia and the centrist (but more radical) Junts. In return for their support he has promised an amnesty for all the participants in the campaign for Catalan independence over the last decade or so. The way is now clear for the Socialist-led coalition to win a vote in parliament next week.

Sánchez’s opponents are outraged at the amnesty plan, and they have considerable popular support; nor, it should be said, did Sánchez himself ever show much enthusiasm for Catalan rights until he needed Junts’s support. But as I’ve said a number of times, it’s basic to democracy that people should be able to work for peaceful constitutional change without fear of being imprisoned for it – and Spain isn’t the only country that needs to learn that lesson.

Poland’s election was the most recent of the three, held three weeks ago, but also the simplest. An alliance of three opposition tickets won a clear majority, with 53.6% of the vote and 248 of the 460 seats. There’s no doubt that the incumbent Law & Justice party has been defeated, but president Andrzej Duda – himself from Law & Justice – has given, as he is entitled to, prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki the first opportunity to form a new government.

Morawiecki will be unable to win a vote of confidence, and parliament will then nominate its own candidate for prime minister, certain to be opposition leader Donald Tusk. Duda can string out the process another couple of weeks, but Tusk should be in office well before Christmas.

Portugal, however, has gone the other way, with the fall of its Socialist government, in office since 2015. An early election last year gave prime minister António Costa a majority in his own right, but this week he fell victim to a corruption scandal; he resigned on Tuesday after prosecutors announced they were investigating charges of influence peddling in relation to mining concessions, although he denies any wrongdoing.

Yesterday president Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa announced that he would dissolve parliament for an election to be held in March. Costa had proposed that an independent, former finance minister Mário Centeno, should take over as prime minister, given that the government’s majority was still intact, but the president decided that an election was necessary to clear the air.

Recent polls have shown the Socialists well down from their 2022 result and only slightly ahead of the centre-right opposition. The far-right Chega (“Enough”) would be well placed to win the balance of power.